The Allegory of Love
A Study in Medieval Tradition — C. S. Lewis's 1936 major scholarly work on medieval and Renaissance allegorical love poetry, his Hawthornden Prize-winning literary-historical achievement
Tradition: Twentieth-century English medieval-Renaissance literary scholarship
Courtly love, allegorical poetry, the medieval European literary tradition — Lewis's scholarly masterpiece on the literary form that organised European love poetry from the troubadours to Spenser
The Allegory of Love (1936) is Lewis's major scholarly work — a literary-historical study of medieval and Renaissance allegorical love poetry from the troubadours (twelfth century) through Chrétien de Troyes, the Roman de la Rose, Chaucer, Gower, the late-medieval allegorical tradition, and finally to Spenser's Faerie Queene. The book traces "courtly love" as both a literary-cultural phenomenon and an allegorical-poetic mode, and is one of the major twentieth-century works of medieval English literary scholarship. The book won the Hawthornden Prize in 1936 and established Lewis's academic reputation alongside his apologetic-popular writing.
Author
Editions cited
- The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford UP, 1936); modern edition with foreword by Karen H. Jaffe (Oxford UP, 2013)
School Embodiments
The medieval allegorical tradition Lewis studies is deeply shaped by Catholic-scholastic theological-philosophical inheritance.
"The medieval poets are not allegorising arbitrarily; they are working within a theological framework that takes the spiritual sense of created things as constitutive of the world." (The Allegory of Love)
Lewis is realist about the historical-cultural specificity of "courtly love" — neither universal nor merely literary, but a specific cultural-historical phenomenon.
"Courtly love is the specific creation of eleventh- and twelfth-century European culture; it is not a universal aspect of human love but a historically conditioned development." (The Allegory of Love)
The Platonic and Neoplatonic framework of medieval allegory — visible things as figures of invisible — runs through Lewis's reading.
"In medieval allegorical poetry, the lady is not (or not only) a particular woman; she is the figure of the higher reality the lover seeks." (The Allegory of Love)
Close descriptive attention to the felt textures of the love-poems Lewis treats — the way they actually work as poetry.
"To read these poems rightly, one must enter into the felt qualities of courtly-love sensibility, not merely catalogue their conventional features." (The Allegory of Love)
Identifies underlying structures — feudal social arrangements, theological inheritance, vernacular literary culture — that produce the visible allegorical-love tradition.
"The conventions of courtly love express specific social-economic conditions of medieval European aristocratic life." (The Allegory of Love)
The medieval allegorical tradition's broader idealism — created things as expressing higher spiritual reality — is the operating framework.
"For the medieval poet, the natural world is itself a system of allegorical signs; the love-poem participates in this larger semiotic." (The Allegory of Love)
The careful philological-historical method has been welcomed by liberal-theological readers as model of careful engagement with religious-cultural inheritance.
"To understand the medieval Christian literary tradition we must respect both its theological commitments and its literary-historical particularity." (The Allegory of Love)
The systematic-philological method is rationalist scholarship in its high mid-twentieth-century form.
"Each work must be read in its proper place in the literary-historical sequence and in its proper theological-cultural context." (The Allegory of Love)
Anglican tradition.
Internal Tensions
Lewis's "courtly love" thesis has been contested by subsequent medievalists (Donaldson, Robertson) who argue it imposes a unified concept on what was actually a more varied literary phenomenon. The work's broader literary-historical achievement is uncontested.
I. Time
The long historical arc from twelfth-century troubadours through sixteenth-century Spenser.
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II. Space
Medieval European literary-cultural space — Provence, Northern France, England, Italy.
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III. Matter
The material texts — manuscripts, early printings — through which the tradition was transmitted.
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IV. Observer
Lewis as philological-historical scholar; the medieval-Renaissance reading public the works addressed.
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V. Energy
The cultural-literary energies that produced courtly love and its allegorical expressions.
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VI. Information
The literary-cultural content of the works treated; the historical-cultural analysis of "courtly love" as a phenomenon.
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Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How The Allegory of Love resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 3 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.