Which 1936 scholarly book by C.S. Lewis examines medieval allegorical love poetry?

The Allegory of Love is C.S. Lewis’s 1936 scholarly study of medieval allegorical love poetry.

The book examines how allegorical conventions shaped discussions of love in medieval and Renaissance literature. Lewis considers writers and works including Ovid, Andreas Capellanus, Chrétien de Troyes, and Edmund Spenser. Its argument connects literary form with changing ideas about emotion, morality, and human relationships.

The book helped establish Lewis as a major literary scholar before he became widely famous for Narnia and popular Christian writing. It also won the Hawthornden Prize in 1937, an award for imaginative literature.

The title can be confused with Lewis’s later studies of Milton or medieval cosmology. A Preface to Paradise Lost focuses on John Milton, while The Discarded Image discusses the medieval and Renaissance model of the universe. The Allegory of Love is specifically centered on the history of allegorical love literature.