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

The Allegory of Love was C.S. Lewis’s 1936 scholarly book about medieval allegory. Its full title is The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition, and it examines the development of allegorical love literature.

Lewis studies works and traditions associated with medieval and Renaissance writers, including Ovid, Andreas Capellanus, Chrétien de Troyes, and Edmund Spenser. The book traces how ideas about courtly love became literary conventions and how those conventions shaped imaginative writing.

The work established Lewis as a major literary scholar and won the Hawthornden Prize in 1937. It is substantially different in purpose from his popular Christian books and children’s fiction, though it reflects his broad knowledge of literature, mythology, and medieval culture.

Readers sometimes confuse the title with The Four Loves, a much later book about kinds of human affection. The Allegory of Love is primarily a history and interpretation of literary traditions, not a modern guide to personal relationships.