Which 1936 book by C.S. Lewis examined medieval allegorical literature?

C.S. Lewis’s 1936 book examining medieval allegorical literature was The Allegory of Love.

The full title is The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. The work traces changing literary ideas about love, especially the tradition often called courtly love, and examines how those ideas appear in medieval poetry and allegory. It helped establish Lewis as a serious literary scholar before his most famous popular works appeared.

The book discusses writers and traditions connected with medieval European literature, including courtly poetry and allegorical narratives. Lewis’s method combines close reading with broad historical comparison, showing how literary conventions develop rather than treating poems as isolated works.

The title is sometimes confused with Lewis’s later academic study English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, which was published in 1954 as part of the Oxford History of English Literature. The Allegory of Love belongs much earlier in Lewis’s scholarly career and was published when he was teaching at Oxford.