The Allegory of Love

Lewis's first scholarly book, published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, in 1936, and the study that established his reputation as a medievalist; it won the Israel Gollancz Memorial Prize. It traces two developments in European literature: the sentiment of courtly love, which Lewis describes as a new feeling arising in eleventh-century Provence, and the allegorical poem as a way of representing the inner life. The book moves from classical and medieval antecedents through the Roman de la Rose, Chaucer and Gower and the allegories of the fifteenth century, to Spenser's Faerie Queene, which Lewis reads as the point where courtly love gives way to the ideal of romantic married love. It is written with the range and liveliness that mark all his criticism and is still read as a landmark in the study of medieval literature, though later scholars have questioned its account of courtly love.