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The professional medievalist must be somewhat bemused by the fact that the literary scholarship and criticism of C.S. Lewis is so little known among his general readership and to some not known at all. After all, teaching literature was Lewis's 'day job' and he expended much energy and talent in writing about it. Following a brief stint as a teacher of philosophy, he spent the first three decades of his career (1925-54) as a Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford, and most of the last decade at the University of Cambridge as the first occupant of the Chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, a professorship that had been created in large part deliberately to lure him there. All aspects of Lewis's voluminous writings were influenced by the conditions and associations of the academic world in which he worked, but for his scholarly writing they were in a sense determinative. Though on occasion he wrote essays about authors and topics across the whole range of English literature, including even the contemporary scene, it was the old Oxford English teaching curriculum - which privileged Old and Middle English texts (roughly from the years 1000 to 1400) and in which even early modern authors were often read from a primarily philological point of view - coupled with a special interest in Spenser from the sixteenth century and Milton from the seventeenth, that defined his principal scope of activity and that I will therefore focus on in this chapter.
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