Which medieval literature subject did C.S. Lewis hold as his Cambridge professorship?

C.S. Lewis held the Cambridge professorship of Medieval and Renaissance Literature.

In 1954, Lewis became the first holder of the newly established chair at Magdalene College, Cambridge. The appointment followed his long Oxford career and recognized his scholarship in English literature, especially medieval and Renaissance writing. He remained at Cambridge until his death in 1963.

Lewis’s academic reputation rested on more than his children’s fiction and Christian apologetics. His book The Allegory of Love, published in 1936, examined medieval traditions of courtly love and helped establish him as a major literary scholar. He also wrote studies of sixteenth-century English literature and produced the influential survey An Experiment in Criticism.

The Cambridge college is Magdalene, pronounced differently from Oxford’s Magdalen College, where Lewis had taught since 1925. The two names are easy to confuse. Lewis’s Cambridge chair was not a professorship of theology, fantasy, or modern literature; its formal subject was Medieval and Renaissance Literature.