Renaissance Man

Master teacher, poet, painter. Brother Louis Schuster was all those things and more – a musician too, well known for introducing music and song into his classes to liven the literature he loved.

When Brother Louie died, a throng of friends, faculty, students, former students and fellow Marianists rose up to mourn the man and his rare qualities.

A renowned scholar, he was someone who defined the term ‘master teacher.’ He loved literature and Shakespeare; he loved his students, and he loved life. He was less concerned with showing what he knew than with trying to get his students to think and discover what they knew.

Chicago-born Schuster joined the Marianist order in 1934, received a bachelor’s degree at St. Mary’s in 1937, bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Oxford University, another master’s from St. Louis University, and a doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin.

An honor graduate of Oxford, he studied under professor-writer J.R.R. Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, and others, and became a prominent member of the International Shakespeare Congress of Scholars and a Renaissance and Sir Thomas More authority. He published three volumes of More’s work and received prestigious awards to study at Duke University, Yale, the Huntington Library, and libraries in Europe for research on neo-Latin academic drama that was published by the University of Texas Press.

The National Council of Teachers of English selected him as one of three American professors to conduct the First International Seminar in the Humanities in Europe in 1970.

A distinguished Piper Professor and St. Mary’s Professor Emeritus, he taught a class in Shakespeare until a few weeks before his death.

Brother Louis Schuster, S.M., died April 25, 1989, at the age of 73. He was a Marianist for 55 years.