What was the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1936 study of medieval and Renaissance love literature?

C.S. Lewis’s 1936 study of medieval and Renaissance love literature was The Allegory of Love.

The book examines how European writers represented love, especially the tradition of courtly love. Lewis discusses major authors and literary developments from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, combining close reading with broad literary history. Its subtitle is A Study in Medieval Tradition.

The work helped establish Lewis as a serious literary scholar before he became widely known for Christian apologetics and children’s fiction. It is often associated with his academic career at Oxford, where he taught English literature. Readers sometimes confuse it with The Four Loves, a later popular book about kinds of human affection, or with Lewis’s imaginative fiction.

The Allegory of Love is a work of literary criticism rather than a novel or devotional book. Its subject is the history and meaning of literary love conventions, not Lewis’s personal conversion story.