Which C.S. Lewis book examines the medieval idea of courtly love?

C.S. Lewis’s book The Allegory of Love examines the medieval idea of courtly love.

Published in 1936, The Allegory of Love is a major work of literary criticism about allegorical writing and the development of the medieval love tradition. Lewis studies how courtly love became a literary convention and traces its expression through writers including Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, and Edmund Spenser.

The book helped secure Lewis’s standing as a scholar of English literature. It is not a work of fiction, despite its evocative title, and it is not primarily a biography of any single poet. Lewis’s analysis connects literary form with changing ideas about love, desire, virtue, and the imagination.

The volume is also useful for understanding the intellectual background of Lewis’s later writing. His sensitivity to symbolism, myth, and medieval thought appears in both his scholarship and his imaginative fiction.