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

C.S. Lewis’s 1936 scholarly book The Allegory of Love helped establish his reputation as a literary scholar.

The book examines allegorical and courtly love literature from the medieval period through the Renaissance. Lewis discusses how writers represented love through personification, symbolism, and elaborate literary conventions. Its subtitle, A Study in Medieval Tradition, signals the historical scope of the work.

The Allegory of Love was significant because it combined close reading with a broad account of changing literary traditions. Lewis wrote as a specialist in English literature, but the book reached readers beyond academic medieval studies and became one of his best-known critical works.

Readers sometimes associate Lewis primarily with Christian apologetics or children’s fantasy, yet his professional career was grounded in literary scholarship. Other major critical works included Rehabilitations, A Preface to Paradise Lost, and The Discarded Image. The Allegory of Love therefore belongs to the scholarly side of Lewis’s career rather than his fiction.