Which 1936 scholarly book made C.S. Lewis’s academic reputation?

The Allegory of Love made C.S. Lewis’s academic reputation in 1936.

The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition was published in 1936. The book examines allegorical representations of love from classical and medieval literature, tracing ideas through writers such as Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, Dante, and Edmund Spenser. Its scholarship helped establish Lewis as a major academic critic before his popular Christian and children’s books became widely known.

Lewis argued that medieval literature should be understood through its own intellectual and imaginative conventions rather than judged only by modern expectations. His discussion of courtly love and allegorical poetry demonstrated the range of his knowledge and his ability to explain difficult literary traditions in an accessible way.

The work won the Hawthornden Prize in 1937. It is sometimes confused with A Preface to Paradise Lost, another important scholarly book, but that later study focused on Milton’s epic. The 1936 volume belongs to Lewis’s medieval-literature scholarship and predates the Narnia novels.