Which 1936 C.S. Lewis book studies the medieval tradition of courtly love?

The Allegory of Love is C.S. Lewis’s 1936 study of the medieval tradition of courtly love. The book examines how allegorical writing and ideas about love developed in medieval European literature.

Lewis traces the subject through major authors and works, including Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, Dante, and Edmund Spenser. Its subtitle, A Study in Medieval Tradition, identifies the book’s historical and literary scope. Lewis argues that courtly love was not simply a private emotion but part of a broader literary and cultural system.

The study established Lewis as a major scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature. It is different from A Preface to Paradise Lost, his later critical work on John Milton, and from his popular Christian books. The Allegory of Love also illustrates the range of Lewis’s career: before becoming widely known as a Christian writer and children’s novelist, he was an influential academic critic of older English and European texts.