Poetic Obituaries: [Charles] 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.

from The New York Times: Charles Muscatine, Chaucer Scholar, Dies at 89

~~~~~~~~~~~