The Allegory of Love

First published in 1936, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition is C. S. Lewis’s landmark work of literary criticism, tracing the development of allegorical love poetry from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Beginning with the medieval tradition of courtly love, Lewis examines how writers transformed love into an elaborate literary and moral system, in which desire, virtue and spiritual aspiration could be embodied by personified figures and imagined landscapes. His study moves through influential works including the Roman de la Rose, the poetry of Edmund Spenser and the allegorical vision of The Faerie Queene, revealing the connections between medieval thought, literary convention and the changing understanding of human passion. Rather than treating allegory as a decorative literary device, Lewis presents it as a way in which entire cultures gave imaginative form to their ideas about love, morality and the soul.

Combining formidable scholarship with a rare gift for lucid explanation, Lewis demonstrates how literary traditions evolve through adaptation, inheritance and creative reinvention. His account illuminates the intellectual world of medieval Europe while showing how its imaginative structures continued to shape English poetry long after the Middle Ages had passed. The book established Lewis as a major literary scholar before his later success as a Christian apologist and author of fiction, and it remains an important contribution to the study of medieval and Renaissance literature. Though grounded in close textual analysis, its wider concern is the relationship between literary form and cultural belief: how writers inherit the language of desire and transform it to express new ideas. For readers interested in the history of literature, the medieval imagination and the enduring symbolism of love, The Allegory of Love offers a richly rewarding account of a tradition that helped shape the Western literary canon.