Which book did C.S. Lewis publish in 1936 as a study of medieval and Renaissance love literature?

C.S. Lewis published The Allegory of Love in 1936 as a study of medieval and Renaissance love literature.

The book examines allegorical love poetry and related literary traditions from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance. Lewis discusses how ideas about love changed across periods and how those ideas shaped literary forms.

The work established Lewis as a major literary scholar before his best-known Christian and imaginative books appeared. It was also his first major scholarly monograph and received the Hawthornden Prize in 1937.

Readers sometimes confuse this title with A Preface to Paradise Lost, another major work of Lewis’s literary criticism, published in 1942. The Allegory of Love is specifically associated with the history and interpretation of allegorical treatments of love.