Which 1936 C.S. Lewis book analyzes medieval ideas of courtly love and allegory?

The Allegory of Love is C.S. Lewis’s 1936 study of medieval ideas about courtly love and allegory.

The full title is The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Lewis examines how medieval and Renaissance writers represented love, personification, and allegorical meaning. The book is a work of literary criticism rather than a novel or devotional text.

Its opening discussion of “courtly love” became especially influential in English-language literary studies. Lewis traces literary conventions across several centuries and considers authors and traditions associated with medieval European poetry. His approach combines close reading with broad historical interpretation.

The book helped establish Lewis’s reputation as a serious scholar before his later fame as a Christian writer and children’s author. It is distinct from The Discarded Image, his later study of the medieval worldview, and from English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, a major reference work he edited and wrote for.