Lewis’s “effort of the historical imagination” in The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition—commensurate with his innate romanticism—bolstered by like-minded writers as his sources, resulted in his reconstructing of Courtly Love and its characters as a fantasy. While this approach limited his understanding of Courtly Love, its origins and its relationship to marriage and adultery, it allowed him to create a mythology of a Religion of Love: a “quasi-religion” of “service love” between a chevalier/poet and his sovereign lady, under the auspices of the god Amor. This view would elevate the medieval Anglo-French allegorical poem, which he will discuss in the following chapters of his book, as the foundation of the best of poetry that led to Chaucer and Edmund Spenser, his favorite poet.
