Charles Muscatine, Chaucer scholar and educational reformer, dies at 89

Charles Muscatine, a University of California, Berkeley, professor emeritus of English, a scholar of Chaucer and medieval literature, and an educational reformer known for refusing to sign a state loyalty oath during the McCarthy era, died of an infection in Oakland on Friday, March 12. He was 89. At a 1999 conference on the loyalty oath, Muscatine explained that refusing the pledge some 50 years earlier “was related to a disease I caught from my father, a Russian immigrant, and that is, acute idealism and acute optimism about the American way of life. And I had early seen in my academic career a kind of nexus between teaching and preservation of American democracy. Born Nov. 28, 1920, in Brooklyn, New York, Muscatine received his B.A. M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in English from Yale University in 1941, 1942 and 1948, respectively.