Which C.S. Lewis work was his first major study of medieval literature?

The Allegory of Love was C.S. Lewis’s first major study of medieval literature.

Published in 1936, the book examines allegorical and courtly love traditions in medieval and Renaissance writing. Lewis studies authors and works including Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, tracing how literary ideas about love developed across periods.

The book established Lewis as an important literary scholar before his best-known Christian apologetic works and children’s fiction appeared. It also helped secure his academic reputation at Oxford, where he taught English literature. His scholarship frequently combined close reading with broad historical arguments about intellectual and literary traditions.

The title does not mean that every work discussed is simply an allegory in the modern sense. Lewis investigates a historical style of thinking and writing in which abstract ideas could be represented through personified figures and narratives. Readers sometimes confuse this study with A Preface to Paradise Lost, his later book devoted specifically to Milton’s epic.