What was the title of C.S. Lewis’s first book about medieval literature?

C.S. Lewis’s first book about medieval literature was The Allegory of Love.

Published in 1936, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition examines allegorical and courtly love literature from the Middle Ages. Lewis traces how medieval writers represented love and how those traditions developed across major literary works.

The book helped establish Lewis as a serious literary scholar before his best-known Christian and imaginative works appeared. It won the Hawthornden Prize in 1937, an award for literature established in Britain in 1919.

The title can be confused with The Discarded Image, Lewis’s later study of the medieval and Renaissance worldview, published in 1964 after his death. The Allegory of Love is specifically the earlier work that launched his scholarly reputation in medieval studies.