Which 1936 C.S. Lewis book examines courtly love in medieval literature?

C.S. Lewis’s 1936 book examining courtly love in medieval literature is The Allegory of Love. Its full subtitle is A Study in Medieval Tradition, and the work traces how allegorical and courtly ideas developed across medieval European writing.

Lewis discusses authors and texts including Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, and Edmund Spenser. He examines the literature of courtly love not simply as a record of romantic behavior, but as a literary tradition with recognizable conventions, values, and symbolic patterns.

The book helped establish Lewis’s reputation as a major literary scholar before he became internationally famous for Narnia and Christian apologetics. Its publication also preceded his academic chair at Cambridge by nearly two decades.

The title can be confused with Lewis’s later A Preface to Paradise Lost, which focuses on John Milton’s epic, or with English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. The Allegory of Love is specifically associated with medieval tradition and the literary history of courtly love.