The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition was published by Oxford University Press in May 1936 and is Lewis’s first major scholarly work — the book that established his reputation as one of the foremost medievalists of the twentieth century. Its thesis is bold: that romantic love, as Western civilization understands it — the idealization of the beloved, the torment of desire, the elevation of passion to a quasi-religious experience — was not a universal human constant but a historical invention, created by the troubadour poets of eleventh-century Provence and transmitted through allegorical poetry to the broader European tradition.
The Argument
Lewis traces the development of the “courtly love” tradition from its origins in the poetry of the troubadours through the Roman de la Rose, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and various late-medieval allegories, culminating in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Along the way, he rehabilitates an entire tradition of allegorical poetry that had been dismissed by modern critics as lifeless and mechanical, arguing instead that allegory was, for medieval writers, a natural and vivid way of representing psychological experience.
The book is both literary criticism and intellectual history: Lewis is interested not just in texts but in the transformation of consciousness that they reflect and promote. His argument that romantic love was invented — that people in the ancient world did not experience or idealize sexual desire in the way that post-troubadour Western culture does — was controversial in 1936 and remains debated today.
Collecting The Allegory of Love
First edition (Oxford University Press, London, 1936): Blue cloth with gilt lettering. Dust jacket.
Market values (with dust jacket):
- Fine in dust jacket: $3,000–$8,000
- Very good in dust jacket: $1,000–$3,000
- Without dust jacket: $200–$500
As Lewis’s first major publication and a foundational work of medieval literary criticism, it is collected by both Lewis collectors and academic specialists.