Wayne Redenbarger’s Literacy Narrative
Redenbarger, Wayne (2013-07-10)
>>WAYNE: Okay, my name is Wayne Redenbarger, Professor
Emeritus of Romance Linguistics here at The Ohio State
University; Emeritus meaning basically you retired but you still get to see some doctoral students and some things like that, or get to meet people like you.
I understand that you are talking about libraries and things so I'm supposed to come up with one out of four million recollections of libraries.
What I work on is historical linguistics, but I specifically, the family that I work on is Latin to Romance although I've also taught History of English.
So one of the things you get into is Latin inscriptions,
Latin manuscripts, Latin palæography, etc.
So the first library that I would mention here at OSU is probably one that you may not run across with everybody and that's the palæography and epigraphy library on West Campus, which I'm guessing you may not have even ever known about— fine we'll take you over there sometime, you'll like it, it's very cool.
But epigraphy is a Greek word meaning "things that are done on stone,” so inscriptions, okay? And palæography is old writing, but especially Medieval manuscripts and things like that.
And this University has a center for that and some very, very neat projects, some of which involve photographic pictures of pieces of Greek inscriptions and then assembling them by computer when they're held in different museums and things like that, etc.
There is a library collection if you look for particular books on epigraphy and palæography at Thompson Library here, you'll find they're not there, they're all over at the epigraphy library, etc. Okay?
One of the things that Professor Ulman was commenting is you know, can you remember somebody that might have helped you?
Where professors who spent half their lives running around libraries usually aren't asking other people for help, but

yeah, the staff over there, Wendy, the assistant over there, at one point actually came up with an index for me with some
Medieval palæography works that I was unaware of, and it was very cool—saved me a whole bunch of time, etc., etc.
So one of the first things is if you're interested in Latin manuscripts, if you're interested in libraries that have collections of all of the relevant reference works and that kind of thing, OSU has a collection of that over there.
Another thing along the same line: at one point we taught our seminar in Romance Linguistics, the doctoral seminar, in the library here, at I guess—that’s right—we’re sitting here. [Moves head to indicate direction] In fact the library’s over there.
In the library, there was a seminar room there, and it had all the Latin dictionaries and the Old Spanish dictionaries and the Old Portuguese and Old French and all those things right there.
And a big monster table that probably weighed about a half a ton sort of thing you could sit about eight students around this, and that's the kind of thing that you had at Harvard.
Harvard has inside of Widener Library, if you've ever had a chance to visit Cambridge, Mass., has a couple three specialized libraries within one of which is a Sanskrit library.
And then the library right next store to it, Room B, is the
Linguistics Library. So when you become a graduate student at Harvard, one of the really nice things is you get your key to Room B and that's sort of the magical keys to the kingdom.
So it's interesting in that library to be able to handle volumes that at any other library would be in the rare book library. There are books from the 1600s and things on the shelf that actually have a little plate on the front saying,
"Was examined by Houghton Library,” which was the rare book library, and no we're not pulling it into the rare library stacks, so here it is, and you can use it and check it out, etc., etc. But you remember when the University was founded in 1638 that means they've got some really old books and stuff.

I always found it amusing that the alphabetization of Indo-
European languages around the walls of Room B, within
Widener Library, that Keltic was under "K" for Keltic as opposed to "C" as in Boston Celtics, which I think those of people who are around ball fans will assume that Keltic’s pronounced Celtic, but and then you realize back at the alphabetization was set in the early 1700s, etc., and you know, at the time in which we were still Indian territory here in Ohio, so for me, I guess my total favorite library in the world is Widener Library at Harvard.
It's an amazing place. It's not just that it has all the stuff that you're looking for, but I lived there for, in fact, carrel #554 is where I wrote my dissertation; they have these little cubbies sorts of things and you can check out books and put them up on the shelf as if you have checked them out in the library, but you can put a little call tag on them and hold them there.
And when I first started working on an Old Portuguese manuscript, one of the first things I needed was an Old
Portuguese unabridged dictionary. And in the stacks I found a copy of the [inaudible] twelve-volume monster thing, and it was in leather bindings, and you know, wow, you know, very nice. But they were old and they were dry and leather bindings tend to crack, so my first task in transporting those to my stacks in my carrel was to buy some of the neat’s-foot oil, and the oil that you can put on there and wipe up the bindings and let them all get soaked up before you open them up and break something. What it produces is the aroma of an English bookshelf with all of the nice leather bindings and stuff and you could smell that for fifty feet around here.
I knew a number of people said, "Oh, I know where your carrel is upstairs on the fifth floor, etc., you're the one with all the leather bindings.”
[Inaudible]
Yeah, yep, that's me.
You can just take lots and lots of the great reference books and just put them right behind your carrel and use them there, so Widener is a place you can sort of go in and hide.

I did a lot of coursework at MIT when I was doing my doctoral work at Harvard. And MIT is a great place but it's a pressure cooker, and it's a high stress kind of operation.
And I remember many-a-day finishing class down at MIT and coming back to Harvard yard and just going in the Widener
Library, and going upstairs and sitting there, and taking about five minutes and letting your decompression happen, and then get your head back on straight, etc., etc.
So it's just, it's sometimes joked that it's the longest mile in America on Massachusetts Avenue—the distance from
MIT to Harvard—and I think that may be true, that may be absolutely true.
So Widener is a place of calm, and wonderful resources, and quiet, and it's funky. It had it's own cataloguing system before the Library of Congress did, and so at one point they finally decided, hey, LC system is how it's going be done to hear the change. So on a given day, happily a few years after I graduated, they quit doing their cataloguing system and went over to Library of Congress, so all of the linguistics books are in rows and rows and then there's a space, and then the books that were purchased after that date are in Library of Congress number. So if you're looking for a book you have to know exactly which year it is to know whether to go to the Harvard system or whether to go up to the other system, etc. It's just little ways that you initiate new graduate students and let them get lost in the stacks and things like that, etc., etc.
Did you have something in particular you wanted to ask?
>>SPEAKER: What do you miss most-
>>WAYNE: Miss?
>>SPEAKER: -about, yeah, about Widener library?
>>WAYNE: Harvard is a very British kind of school, and it has amazing resources, and some of that comes down to money but not all of it's money; some of it's attitude if you know what I mean.
I love baroque music and there are lots of sort of early instrument baroque ensembles in Boston and stuff where we don't have any Columbus, etc.

It's that kind of thing, but I'll give you an example: my dissertation director was Francis Miller Rodgers. He had been Dean of the Graduate School. He had also been George
Patton's translator in World War II, so you can imagine this very large ex-Marine sort of extremely authoritative sort of person.
[Inaudible]
He called me at home one day and said, "Would you be interested in working on a Medieval manuscript by Zudata if we could come up with, so as one of the early chroniclers for [inaudible] and Zudata, so this is the oldest, some of the oldest prose writing in Portuguese, pre-Renaissance and stuff, so cool for a guy looking at old Portuguese, this was great.
I said sure, and I wasn't [inaudible].
He says, “Okay, fine.” Click. Okay, fine.
It turned out that a rare manuscript dealer was offering this on the market and they had contacted Harvard and said,
“Would you like to have this,” and what Rodgers did was they had asked him and he says, “Fine, I've got a student and
I'll see if he's interested.” “You're interested? Okay, fine. Thanks.” So they bought it. So there was $18,500 that they laid out to buy this one manuscript because one of the students might be interested in it. Okay, fine. And this was
35 years ago, etc., so gosh knows what the thing costs.
That manuscript that I worked on was in cursive hint, and so it wasn't in the fancy presentation.
And it was on good paper but it wasn't vellum it was a work copy, and it had notes in the margin. Which, you can have manuscripts sometimes, but it had some fingers drawn like this in one place, [Indicates with finger] that says ,
"deche" and then about a page in half later it says,
"adeche," you know, so from here to here, right?
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