Which C.S. Lewis book was published in 1936 as a study of medieval love literature?

The Allegory of Love was published by C.S. Lewis in 1936 as a study of medieval love literature. Its subtitle is A Study in Medieval Tradition, and the work examines how allegorical ideas about love developed in European literature.

Lewis discusses authors and texts including Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, Dante, and Edmund Spenser. He argues that medieval writers often treated love through elaborate allegorical structures rather than through the conventions of the modern love story.

The book helped establish Lewis as a major literary scholar before his best-known apologetic and fictional works appeared. Its scholarship also reflects his long-standing interest in medieval and Renaissance literature.

The title can be confused with Lewis’s later academic works, including A Preface to Paradise Lost and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. The Allegory of Love is specifically the 1936 study centered on medieval literary tradition.