What was the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1936 book about medieval allegorical love literature?
Answer
The Allegory of Love
C.S. Lewis’s 1936 book about medieval allegorical love literature was The Allegory of Love.
The book is a scholarly study of allegorical treatments of love in medieval and Renaissance literature. Lewis examines how writers represented love through personification, symbolism, and inherited literary conventions rather than treating it only as a private emotion.
The work established Lewis as a major literary scholar before his popular Christian apologetics and children’s fiction made him internationally famous. Its analysis ranges across medieval texts and includes discussion of courtly love and allegorical traditions.
The Allegory of Love is sometimes confused with The Discarded Image, another important study of medieval literature published later. A Preface to Paradise Lost focuses on John Milton, while English Literature in the Sixteenth Century is a much broader historical survey.