C.S. Lewis’s scholarly book The Allegory of Love was published in 1936.
The full title is The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. The book examines the development of allegorical love literature from classical sources through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance.
Lewis discusses writers and traditions including Ovid, the Roman de la Rose, and Edmund Spenser. Its opening chapter, “Courtly Love,” helped establish Lewis’s influential account of medieval literary culture and the conventions of courtly love.
The book was important to Lewis’s academic reputation before his best-known theological and fictional works appeared. It won the Hawthornden Prize in 1937. Readers sometimes confuse its publication date with those of Lewis’s first science-fiction novel, Out of the Silent Planet, published in 1938.