Which Cambridge college appointed C.S. Lewis to its chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature?

Magdalene College appointed C.S. Lewis to its chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge.

Lewis held the Cambridge professorship from 1954 until his death in 1963. The appointment marked a major change in his academic career, which had previously been centered at Oxford. At Cambridge, he became a fellow of Magdalene College and continued teaching and writing while maintaining important intellectual connections with Oxford.

His Cambridge position was the chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature. The field suited Lewis’s long-standing scholarly interests in medieval texts, Renaissance writing, allegory, mythology, and literary history. His academic books included The Allegory of Love and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama.

A common mix-up is to associate all of Lewis’s university work with Oxford, where he spent most of his teaching career and where he was a fellow of Magdalen College. Cambridge’s Magdalene College is a different institution, and its spelling includes the final “e.”