What was the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1936 book about medieval allegory in English literature?

C.S. Lewis’s 1936 book about medieval allegory was titled The Allegory of Love.

The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition was published in 1936. It examines the development of allegorical ideas about love in medieval literature, discussing writers and traditions that influenced English poetry and later literary culture.

The book helped establish Lewis’s scholarly reputation before his most famous popular works appeared. Its subject is literary history and interpretation, not a retelling of one particular romance. Lewis analyzes how abstract qualities and emotional experiences were represented through personification, narrative, and symbolic structures.

The title is sometimes confused with The Discarded Image, another major work of Lewis’s medieval scholarship. The Discarded Image was published much later, in 1964, and focuses on the medieval and Renaissance model of the universe. The Allegory of Love instead belongs to Lewis’s earlier Oxford period and was an important academic achievement.