Which medieval poem inspired C.S. Lewis’s 1936 book Allegory of Love?

The Romance of the Rose helped inspire C.S. Lewis’s 1936 scholarly book The Allegory of Love.

The Romance of the Rose is a major medieval French poem that presents courtly love through dream vision and allegorical figures. Lewis used it as part of a broader study of medieval and Renaissance treatments of love and allegory.

The Allegory of Love is not simply a retelling of one poem. It examines the development of allegorical and courtly-love traditions across several writers and periods, including English and continental literature.

Readers often associate Lewis’s medieval scholarship with Dante, Chaucer, or Spenser, all of whom mattered to his academic interests. However, The Romance of the Rose is the specific medieval work most closely connected with the title and central subject of The Allegory of Love.