Which C.S. Lewis book won the 1937 Hawthornden Prize?

The Allegory of Love won the 1937 Hawthornden Prize. C.S. Lewis’s study, published in 1936, examines representations of love in medieval and Renaissance literature.

The book is especially known for its account of the medieval tradition of courtly love and for its discussion of works by writers including Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, Dante, and Edmund Spenser. Lewis combines literary history with close reading and argues that literary ideas about love changed significantly across periods.

The Hawthornden Prize was awarded to The Allegory of Love the year after publication. It was an important early recognition of Lewis as a literary scholar, before the later fame brought by his Christian apologetics and children’s fiction.

Readers sometimes confuse this title with Lewis’s later literary studies, including The Discarded Image and A Preface to Paradise Lost. Those books also deal with historical literature, but neither received the 1937 Hawthornden Prize. The prize-winning work is The Allegory of Love.