Which 1936 book made C.S. Lewis prominent as a literary scholar?

The Allegory of Love made C.S. Lewis prominent as a literary scholar in 1936.

The book’s full title is The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. It examines how medieval writers represented love, tracing a tradition from classical and Christian sources through authors including Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, Dante, and Edmund Spenser. Lewis combined close reading with a broad account of medieval literary culture.

The work helped establish his reputation before his best-known Christian and children’s books appeared. It also reflects his professional specialization: medieval and Renaissance literature. Lewis’s scholarship was admired for its clarity and force, although later scholars have debated some of its historical generalizations.

The title is sometimes confused with Lewis’s later literary studies. A Preface to Paradise Lost appeared in 1942, and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century was published in 1954. Neither was the 1936 book that first brought him major scholarly prominence.