Which 1936 C.S. Lewis book examines Christian themes through medieval and Renaissance literature?

The Allegory of Love is C.S. Lewis’s 1936 study of medieval and Renaissance literature and its treatment of love.

The book’s subtitle, A Study in Medieval Tradition, signals its academic purpose. Lewis traces how allegorical ideas about love developed in European writing, discussing authors and traditions that influenced later English literature. The work helped establish his reputation as a serious literary scholar before his popular Christian books made him internationally famous.

Lewis wrote The Allegory of Love while teaching English literature at Oxford. Its subject is literary history rather than a retelling of one particular story, so it is sometimes confused with his later book The Discarded Image, which examines the medieval model of the universe.

The study also illustrates Lewis’s broad range: he wrote fiction and apologetics, but his professional field was the history and criticism of English literature.