What was the title of C.S. Lewis's 1936 scholarly book on medieval and Renaissance love literature?

C.S. Lewis’s 1936 scholarly book on medieval and Renaissance love literature was The Allegory of Love. Its subtitle, A Study in Medieval Tradition, identifies the historical tradition Lewis examines.

The book traces changing ideas about love in medieval literature and discusses the development of allegorical writing. Lewis considers authors and works including Ovidian influence, courtly love traditions, and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. The study helped establish his reputation as a literary scholar.

Lewis’s academic career centered on English literature, especially medieval and Renaissance writing. His scholarship was distinct from his later popular apologetics and children’s fiction, although recurring interests—myth, imagination, virtue, and literary tradition—connect the different parts of his work.

The title is sometimes confused with The Discarded Image, another Lewis study of medieval thought. The Allegory of Love was published earlier, in 1936, and focuses specifically on love literature and allegorical tradition.