Charles Muscatine, a scholar who transformed Chaucer studies by turning attention to the French models for Chaucer’s poetry, and who pursued a side career as an educational reformer after becoming embroiled in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, died on March 12 in Oakland, Calif. He was 89 and lived in Berkeley.
The cause was a lung infection, his daughter, Lissa, said.
Mr. Muscatine’s “Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning,” published by the University of California Press in 1957, remains an essential work for understanding one of England’s greatest poets. Expanding his inquiries beyond the traditional source studies, Mr. Muscatine rejected the widely held view of Chaucer as a poet who had progressed from stilted conventionalism to a robust, purely English realism. Rather, Mr. Muscatine described an artist who had shaped to his own uses the themes and devices he found in the courtly and bourgeois poetry that developed in France in the 12th and 13th centuries.
“It remains astonishingly undated,” said David Lawton, the executive director of the New Chaucer Society. “The sheer quality of Muscatine’s reading continues to set an almost impossibly high standard, and virtually single-handedly he opened up Chaucer studies to France and Chaucer’s secular, French heritage. There has been a huge growth in this field, most of it following along the routes he made.”
Student unrest at Berkeley in the 1960s created a new role for Mr. Muscatine, who had begun teaching at the campus in 1948. During the Free Speech Movement, as students staged sit-ins and demonstrations to protest restrictions on political speech on university property, he played a leading role in mediating between students and the university administration.
His sympathy for student demands over free-speech issues came from hard experience. In 1949 he and 30 other professors, invoking the principal of academic freedom, refused to sign an anti-Communist loyalty oath then newly required by the State of California. Mr. Muscatine was fired and regained his job only after the California Supreme Court ruled that the oath was unconstitutional.Continue reading the main story
After the immediate crisis on campus had subsided, Mr. Muscatine was asked to lead a faculty committee charged with proposing educational reforms at the university. “Education at Berkeley,” published in 1966, quickly became known as the Muscatine Report and attracted widespread attention for the boldness of its plans to encourage nontraditional courses and break down interdisciplinary barriers.
Although 16 of its 42 proposals were adopted by the faculty senate, most failed to take hold. Within a few years the appetite for radical change had abated. “Faculties are ready to sit on their private concerns again,” Mr. Muscatine said in 1972.
Seizing the initiative, Mr. Muscatine helped found the Collegiate Seminar Program, better known as Strawberry Creek College, an experimental program at the university that he directed in the 1970s. Its ideas later became influential in community colleges and experimental universities around the country that follow the “learning community” model.
Charles Samuel Muscatine was born on Nov. 28, 1920, in Brooklyn, N.Y., and grew up in Trenton. After earning a bachelor’s degree in English from Yale in 1941 and a master’s degree in 1942, he enlisted in the Navy. He took part in landing operations in North Africa and Salerno, Italy. He was given the Navy Commendation Medal for his bravery during the D-Day landings at Omaha Beach in Normandy, France.
In 1948 he received his doctorate in English from Yale and joined Berkeley’s English department as an assistant professor specializing in medieval literature. After losing his job, he taught at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., returning to Berkeley in 1954 after the court ruling on the loyalty oath. He retired in 1991.
His wife, the former Doris Corn, died in 2006. His daughter, Lissa, a speechwriter and senior adviser for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, lives in Bethesda, Md. He is also survived by a son, Jeffrey, of Mountain View, Calif., and six grandchildren.
In addition to his pioneering study of Chaucer’s French sources, Mr. Muscatine published “Poetry and Crisis in the Age of Chaucer” (1972), “The Old French Fabliaux” (1986) and “Medieval Literature, Style and Culture” (1999), an essay collection.
Strongly committed to undergraduate teaching, unlike many of his tenured colleagues, he collaborated with Marlene Griffith on two works used widely in introductory English courses, “The Borzoi College Reader” (1966) and “First Person Singular” (1973). He continued to agitate for reform in undergraduate education; in 2009 the University of Virginia Press published his “Fixing College Education: A New Curriculum for the 21st Century.”Continue reading the main story