Thomas Liszka taught Chaucer for years as one of his literature courses at Penn State Altoona. Although he retired, he did not let go of his connection to the author of the Canterbury Tales; since retirement as associate professor emeritus of English, he’s been researching, writing articles, and—just for entertainment, during the pandemic—teaching Zoom classes on Chaucer for his fellow Altoona Community Theater actors.
His most recent article idea came about, Liszka says, when he “happened to notice a connection between St. Oswald’s life and a character in the Canterbury Tales.” For the uninitiated, the premise of the work is a group of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury Cathedral—led by “The Host” and known to readers as “The Knight,” “The Miller,” “The Nun,” and so on—entertain themselves by each telling a tale during the trip, competing for a free meal on the return trip.
It was another literary work, The South English Legendary (SEL), written in the second half of the 13th century, that helped Liszka make the connection. The SEL is “a collection of saints’ lives written in English in verse mostly for the edification of lay people, and it’s mostly miracles and bloody martyrdoms,” Liszka explains. Like the Canterbury Tales, the SEL is written in verse because “rhyme appealed to common people; it was very popular at the time.”
Osewold the Reeve
The tale that caught Liszka’s attention is “The Reeve’s Tale” and the character Osewold the Reeve. Both his name and his story have similarities to writings about St. Oswald that appear in the SEL. In “Chaucer’s Osewold the Reeve and St. Oswald the Bishop (from the South English Legendary and Other Sources)” (published in Leeds Studies in English), Liszka draws “a line between one, probably apocryphal episode from the life of St. Oswald and the comical episode from Osewold the Reeve’s Tale. In the saint’s life, a hapless monk, returning from his bath, accidentally gets into the bed of St. Oswald and is beaten by devils for his presumption. In ‘The Reeve’s Tale,’ mayhem also results from a similar episode of musical beds. A wife accidentally gets into a visiting college student’s bed and sleeps with him by mistake. His companion student accidentally gets into bed with her husband and brags about his sexual exploit with their daughter. A fight ensues, and the husband (who represents one of the Reeve’s enemies in his tale) is beaten by the demonic college students who outwitted him. There’s more to the story, but the parallel seems obvious.”
Connecting a character to a real person takes some detective work. Fewer than a third of those in the Canterbury Tales have proper names; the rest are merely identified by their profession. The Host, however, is identified as Harry Bailey, a name mentioned just once in the Tales. “Scholars have found,” Liszka says, “that there was a tavern owner in London with that name.” While most characters with proper names are mentioned only once, he notes, Osewold the Reeve gets three mentions, “in Chaucer’s attempt to remind his audience of the similar episode from the life of the Reeve’s saintly namesake and to invite them to draw thematic connections.”
While Liszka may be retired, he’s not finished his research: “I haven’t hung up my hat on scholarship.” He elaborates: “I’m really a manuscripts kind of person,” which means manuscripts written a very long time ago—“that’s been most of my scholarly focus. I’ve worked with medieval manuscripts at the British Museum and Oxford and Cambridge.” And so he will continue to research, write, and share Chaucer even if it’s only by Zoom.
—Therese Boyd, ’79