ABSTRACT
There are two kinds of travellers, C. S. Lewis writes in his essay "De Audiendis Poetis". C. S. Lewis's most influential contribution to medieval literary studies in general and Chaucer studies in particular was The Allegory of Love. The four aspects of the medieval mindset which Lewis outlines in The Allegory of Love, and which became his most important contribution to Chaucer studies, are his understanding of courtly love, his rejection of irony as a ruling mode in Chaucer, his theory of allegory, and his emphasis on the psychology of medieval works. Based in part on this belief that the theory of courtly love would have been taken seriously, C. S. Lewis disagrees with modern critics who find irony and satire in works such as Troilus and Criseyde. Lewis's medieval universe had little room for a work as messy, chaotic, unfinished and, frankly, as "common" as the Canterbury Tales.
