Lloyd A.W. Kasten (1905-1999)

photo byJ. Snow LLOYD A.W. KASTEN (1905-1999) Joseph T. Snow Michigan State University Lloyd Kasten's early years were spent in the farming community of Watertown, Wisconsin and, until he began attending school, he was German -speaking. A fortune-teller would have had a difficult time predicting his future as a distinguished scholar ofmedieval Spain. Ever the good student, when it came time to seek entry into a university Kasten stayed close to home, choosing to attend the University of Wisconsin in Madison where he would earn all three of his degrees.1 But Spanish was, initially , only a secondary interest in his BA program in Commerce which he finished in 1926. Spanish, he thought, even in those early days, would improve his chances for a well-paying job upon graduation. Already a speaker of German and English, his foray into Spanish ignited a passion for the Romance Languages and so he also took up French and Latin. Portuguese would come only slighdy later. Of these, Spanish remained his first love and he participated in two undergraduate Spanish language theatrical productions and was active in the Spanish Club, even serving one year as its treasurer. Kasten decided that he might sharpen his skills in Spanish even further and took an MA in the language at Wisconsin immediately upon graduation, earning the degree in 1927. The department recommended him for a teaching instructorship in Gainesville and he spent one year (1927-1928) at the University ofFlorida, the only one he ever spent not associated closely with his alma mater. At this stage, he was more than ready for his first trip to Spain and a commercial career was put on hold once again. In Spain Kasten studied at Madrid's famed Centro de Estudios Históricos (founded by the then dean of Spanish medieval scholars, 1 Kasten would later earn an honorary doctorate in 1981 as well, at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, where as many of ten ofhis former students taught either full-time or as visiting professors. Z4 corónica 29.1 (Fall, 2000): 252-258 254Joseph T. SnowLa corónica 29.1, 2000 Ramón Menéndez Pidal) alongside Rafael Lapesa, Americo Castro, Amado Alonso and others. With such exposure, it is little wonder that Kasten was in the process of becoming a first-rate medievalist. It was a decisive year, for Kasten subsequentiy applied for and was accepted into Wisconsin's program ofdoctoral study in Spanish. He rapidly completed the required course ofstudy and wrote a masterful thesis in 1931, on the Aragonese manuscript of Juan Fernández de Heredia's Secreto Secretorum. The next decade would be a very busy one indeed for Kasten. First he was invited to teach in the department as an Instructor and it is safe to assume that he litde imagined he would stay on for another sixty-eight years, forty-four in active service as a teacher and twenty-four more as an untiring Emeritus Professor still hard at work. He received a fellowship from Wisconsin which allowed him to return to Spain by ship for a year of study (1932-1933) where his work with important Alfonsine manuscripts and visits to Portugal would yield a lifetime ofwork dedicated to the Iberian peninsula, its life, literatures and cultures. Toward the end of the decade, in 1937, Antonio G. Solalinde, a brilliant young Spaniard who had established at Wisconsin only short years before the Seminary of Medieval Spanish Studies, died suddenly, and Kasten was asked to assume the directorship of the Seminary. He accepted and gave it the direction and shape that it was to keep for more than a half-century: historiography , lexicography, textual criticism, manuscript editing and, eventually, a distinguished series of publications under the new rubric of "HSMS", the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies. Also in 1937, Kasten achieved the rank ofAssistant Professor at Wisconsin . Some of these early days were spent creating, often in collaboration , text books for a growing national public for Spanish instruction. Portuguese, however, was only then becoming recognized and Wisconsin , under Kasten's stewardship, became one of the most active departments in the United States in the teaching...