The Footnote: A Curious History

by Anthony Grafton

The weapon of pedants, the scourge of undergraduates, the bête noire of the “new” liberated the lowly footnote, long the refuge of the minor and the marginal, emerges in this book as a singular resource, with a surprising history that says volumes about the evolution of modern scholarship. In Anthony Grafton’s engrossing account, footnotes to history give way to footnotes as history, recounting in their subtle way the curious story of the progress of knowledge in written form. Grafton treats the development of the footnote―the one form of proof normally supplied by historians in support of their assertions―as writers on science have long treated the development of laboratory equipment, statistical arguments, and reports on as a complex story, rich in human interest, that sheds light on the status of history as art, as science, and as an institution. The book starts in the Berlin of the brilliant nineteenth-century historian Leopold von Ranke, who is often credited with inventing documented history in its modern form. Casting back to antiquity and forward to the twentieth century, Grafton’s investigation exposes Ranke’s position as a far more ambiguous one and offers us a rich vision of the true origins and gradual triumph of the footnote. Among the protagonists of this story are Athanasius Kircher, who built numerous documents into his spectacularly speculative treatises on ancient Egypt and China; Pierre Bayle, who made the footnote a powerful tool in philosophical and historical polemics; and Edward Gibbon, who transformed it into a high form of literary artistry. Proceeding with the spirit of an intellectual mystery and peppered with intriguing and revealing remarks by those who “made” this history, The Footnote brings what is so often relegated to afterthought and marginalia to its rightful place in the center of the literary life of the mind.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Books About Books, Writing, Academic, Textbooks, Reference

256 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1997

About the author

Anthony Thomas Grafton is an American historian of early modern Europe and the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, where he is also the Director the Program in European Cultural Studies. He is also a corresponding fellow of the British Academy and a recipient of the Balzan Prize. From January 2011 to January 2012, he served as the President of the American Historical Association. From 2006 to 2020, Grafton was co-executive editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

Reviews

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 3 out of 5]

A recent café conversation about footnotes induced me to excavate Grafton's "curious history," a book that had long been buried next to The Devil's Details. I enjoyed it – which probably says as much about me as that I own two books on such a topic or indulge in such conversations.

Does the world of Serious Readers divide among those who prefer footnotes to endnotes? Who knew that the marvelous footnotes of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall began as endnotes, and only came to occupy their constantly-tempting location at the foot of the page after David Hume complained to Gibbon's publisher? I'm with Hume on this – I love the distraction of footnote fascinations as I read – with the exception of Ken Wilber's doorstop Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, the last third of which (as I recall from 1995) is essays disguised as endnotes.

On the other hand, writers as far back as Cervantes and Rabelais have celebrated the arcane idiocy of proving one's erudition at every turn. (Think of Eliot's "Waste Land.") I was delighted to learn of one Gottlieb Wilhelm Rabener, author of Notes without a Text (1743), which consisted entirely of footnotes. "He gave us notes to which the text must serve as commentary."* Grafton himself isn't immune to the inadvertent comedy of over-referencing, but I'd be disappointed with less.

____________________________
* Grafton quoting Lichtenberg, author of the wonderful Waste Books.

[Graychin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Grafton might have made a really engaging book out of this idea had he broadened his scope a bit and provided what he advertised, a “curious history of the footnote.” Instead, what he’s given us (in admittedly winning prose) is a look at the use and abuse of footnotes among historians, and primarily among academic historians of the modern (1800+) era. I enjoyed the relatively short bits on Gibbon and Athanasius Kircher, but I’m afraid that The Footnote is too much inside-baseball for those of us who never did post-graduate work in history.

[Richard Bartholomew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The blurb for this book promises "the history of the footnote". What it delivers, however, is an enquiry into the role of the footnote in historiography, and its place in intellectual history. Footnotes have various functions: they may expand on or digress from the main text in various ways, or they may provide source citations. Grafton is attentive to these various uses, but it is citation which gives his story its (somewhat tortuous) narrative shape. As he writes near the end of the book: "Only the use of footnotes and research techniques associated with them makes it possible to resist the efforts of modern governments, tyrannical and democratic alike, to conceal the compromises they have made, the deaths they have caused, the tortures they or their allies have inflicted". This is a eulogy to the footnote as an instrument of historical documentation, rather than to the footnote as ironic or witty aside to the reader.

Grafton, naturally enough, whets our appetite with a bit of Edward Gibbon, before an extensive course of Leopold von Ranke. The book then darts back and forth between historical periods, including the ancient world. His primary concern is with scholars, and he brings to life a number of figures who are either unknown to the non-specialist or who retain a dim shadowy afterlife in Gibbon's footnotes. Less attention is given to the mechanics of footnoting or to the evolution of modern citation styles, and printers and publishers appear only in passing. One of the few publishers mentioned by name is William Strahan, as the recipient of a letter from David Hume advising him to convert Edward Gibbon's endnotes for Volume 1 of the Decline and Fall into footnotes.

The most interesting chapter for my purposes is on "Ecclesiastical Historians and Antiquaries". In 1636 a German Jesuit named Athanasius Kircher published Prodromus coptus, which included a discussion of a Chinese stele now known to history as the Nestorian Monument. The discovery was dismissed by Protestants as a Jesuit forgery, and so he set about systematically documenting all the eyewitness testimony he could gather. The result was a new text, "constantly interrupted by section breaks and pocked throughout with different languages and alphabets". However, this method of compilation was not new: Grafton draws comparisons with Eusebius (who probably used secretaries to compile material collected by Origen and Pamphilus) and Cesare Baronio, and in his use of plates with Antonio Bosio, "the Columbus of the Catacombs". Kircher's approach remained credulous – later, Grafton discusses his attempt to refute Isaac Casaubon's dismissal of the dialogues of Hermes Trismegistus as late Greek forgeries rather than ancient Egyptian wisdom.

The compilation of documents was also undertaken by Lorenzo Valla, to debunk the Donation of Constantine; Luther read his book (in an edition printed by Ulrich von Hutten) with "fascinated incredulity". Protestants and Catholics both began to amass and assess evidence to support their rival interpretations of the past: the Vatican commissioned Giulio Romano to create a fresco on the Donation using "the most up-to-date archaeological information". Flacius Illyricus created a historical institute to gather material, and was accused of overspending: "Church history, in other words, spawned the first grant-supported historical research institute – and the first charges that the grant money had been wasted." He was also accused of cutting material out of manuscripts rather than taking notes: the "Flacian knife" became proverbial. In England, meanwhile, Archbishop Matthew Parker “pillaged Cathedral libraries”, and produced an edition of Asser’s Life of Alfred with interpolations and printed in affected Anglo-Saxon type which misrepresented the original.

I find myself wondering about possible factors in the development of the footnote which Grafton does not discuss: legal judgements, for instance, require citations from specific laws and precedents. Grafton mentions sixteenth and seventeenth century editions of Classical works in which the author's words were "ringed with a band of text wider than the original" consisting of various commentaries ("cum notis variorum"); I was put in mind here of printed editions of the Talmud.

[claire]

i read this for a history class and i can confirm that reading about the history of footnotes is even more boring than you can imagine

[Ben Sherift · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is tremendously disappointing. Given the title, one might reasonably expect that the book deals with footnotes; however, such a reasonable expectant would be gravely disappointed. As a footnote enthusiast, I cannot explain the disregard for such a fascinating topic in favor of esoteric discussion of old historiography. The footnote’s glory remains untold for a future author. Hopefully, such a author materializes soon.

[Tait Jensen · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who has always enjoyed rummaging through the cluttered basement of footnotes stacked at the bottom of pages, I was drawn to this book for its peculiar subject matter. This is not, however, a history of the footnote in a literal sense. Instead, what Grafton produces is a fascinating, cursory glance into intellectual history, and particularly the discourse of historians throughout the centuries. The reader is left with a substantive understanding of the role the footnote has played in a continual, self-referential discussion of history, beginning, quite possibly, with the Greek and Roman writers who took it upon themselves to mention, at least in passing, the older writer to whom they owed a quote or passage. The footnote emerges as an example of a shifting form/practice within the historical literary genre, resulting from the marriage of the personal quirks of famous historians as well as sweeping social movements in European intellectual communities. One is left pondering the question: what is the true purpose of citation? For, indeed, the sheer bulk of historical research and criticism indicates that footnotes, in and of themselves, serve only as the infrastructure upon which an individual historian can hang his arguments via reference to older authors; they are no sure thing. Even still, as Grafton concludes, "the culturally contingent and eminently fallible footnote offers the only guarantee we have that statements about the past derive from identifiable sources. And that is the only ground we have to trust them." Modern history is messy, in other words, and the footnote helps wherever it can.

[Nate Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The curious history here is about the ways footnotes have become objects of criticism, not so much a genealogical development of the technique. Grafton starts his book with the historian Ranke, a touchpoint for learning historians, and dissects myths about how Ranke's footnotes were of the highest evidentiary quality. In subsequent chapters he delves into a number of other post-Renaissance communities to illuminate why footnotes were used and how highly they were thought of.

Grafton is a superb writer. The text is so lively and enjoyable that if I were picking it up with no information about it, I might think it was historical fiction. He brings conflicts over footnotes to the fore and the book is better for it. I started reading this wanting to know about the technical/social reasons footnotes became popular and even when I realized it wasn't exactly that, I couldn't put the book down.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Grafton, Anthony. 1997. The Footnote: A Curious History. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

This was the first book I read for the 12 Books, 12 Months Challenge.

I don’t think I have much to say about this book. I did enjoy it but it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. It was both more and less. It was more in that it was focused, and fairly deeply, on the footnote in history; i.e., in historical writing or history as discipline. It was less in that it wasn’t a history of footnotes in general.

Contents:

* Preface
* Acknowledgments
* 1 Footnotes: The Origin of a Species
* 2 Ranke: A Footnote about Scientific History
* 3 How the Historian Found His Muse: Ranke’s Path to the Footnote
* 4 Footnotes and Philosophie: An Enlightenment Interlude
* 5 Back to the Future, 1: De Thou Documents the Details
* 6 Back to the Future, 2: The Antlike Industry of Ecclesiastical Historians and Antiquaries
* 7 Clarity and Distinctness in the Abysses of Erudition: The Cartesian Origins of the Modern Footnotes
* Epilogue: Some Concluding Footnotes
* Index

On the role(s) of the footnote:

“In the modern world … historians perform two complementary tasks. They must examine all the sources relevant to the solution of a problem and construct a new narrative or argument from them. The footnote proves that both tasks have been carried out. It identifies both the primary evidence that guarantees the story’s novelty in substance and the secondary works that do not undermine its novelty in form and thesis. By doing so. moreover, it identifies the work of history in question as the creation of a professional” (4-5).

“Footnotes exist, rather, to perform two other functions. First, they persuade: they convince the reader that the historian has done an acceptable amount of work, enough to lie within the tolerances of the field. … Second, they indicate the chief sources the historian has actually used” (22).

On the dagger in the back:

“Like the shabby podium, carafe of water, and rambling, inaccurate introduction which assert that a particular person deserves to be listened to when giving a public lecture, footnotes confer authority on a writer.
Unlike other types of credentials, however, footnotes sometimes afford entertainment—normally in the form of daggers stuck in the backs of the author’s colleagues. Some of these are inserted politely. Historians may simply cite a work by author, title, place and date of publication. But often they quietly set the subtle but deadly “cf.” (“compare”) before it. This indicates, at least to the expert reader, both that an alternative view appears in the cited work and that it is wrong” (7-8).

Nowadays, most of us know from the conference or the dreaded webinar experience that that “shabby podium, …” does nothing of the kind to assert someone deserves to be listened to, except in the polite professional sense. We may, often as not, be polite by quietly as possible leaving that session.

Footnotes do have their critics:

“More than one recent critic has pointed out that footnotes interrupt a narrative. References detract from the illusion of veracity and immediacy … (Noel Coward made the same point more memorably when he remarked that having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love” (69-70).

Sadly, some footnotes are like that. Thankfully not all.

The best of all possible footnotes:

“No one negotiated the bibliographical and moral minefields of this brand of scholarship more expertly than the great philosopher Leibniz—who not only proved by metaphysical argument that he was living in the best of all possible worlds, but also proved by extensive archival research and the publication of any number of texts that his patrons, the house of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, could boast of the best of all possible genealogies” (182).

Sorry, I couldn’t help but include this quote as just the previous night before coming across it I was urging Sara to read Candide.

Perhaps my newest motto:

“I am most truly (said Bayle) a protestant; for I protest indifferently against all Systems, and all Sects” (192fn5).

Summation of the history of the footnote:

“Naturally it took time for anything resembling a uniform citation practice to establish itself in the varied ecologies where Europe’s scholars fought with note and claw for intellectual space” (219).

I adore the phrase “fought with note and claw for intellectual space.”

“Footnotes flourished most brightly in the eighteenth century, when they served to comment ironically on the narrative in the text as well as support its veracity. In the nineteenth century, they lost the prominent role of the tragic chorus. Like so many Carmens, they found themselves reduced to laborers and confined to a vast, dirty factory. What began as art became, inevitably, routine” (229).

“One could say much the same … of the footnote. A palimpsest, it reveals on examination research techniques framed in the Renaissance, critical rules first stated during the Scientific Revolution, the irony of Gibbon, the empathy of Ranke, and the savagery of Leo—as well as the slow growth of publishing conventions, educational institutions, and professional structures which reshaped historians’ lives and work” (229).

If one only wanted the extremely short version of the story, the 13-page Epilogue does a pretty good job of recapping the story of the historian’s footnote.

If you like history and historiography then this book is probably for you. If you are looking for a quick introduction and overview then read chapter one and the Epilogue.

[Essie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an enjoyably written survey of the history of Western historiography. Grafton investigates the footnote and appendix in their current forms, providing source citations as well as scholarly dialogue to support and supplement the main text. In searching for the origin of the modern footnote, he looks back in reverse chronology through the 19th century, the Enlightenment, and the Renaissance and Reformation and discusses the methods of annotation and commentary employed by prominent scholars. There is, not surprisingly, no simple answer to who created the modern footnote. Among the more prominent scholars Grafton focuses on are Jean Le Clerc (1657-1736), Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), David, Hume (1711-76), Justus Möser (1720-94), William Robertson (1721-93), Edward Gibbon (1737-94), Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824), and Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886). To put a 240 page book into a few sentences, the scholars listed above, reacting to the religious, political, and scholarly problems of their times continuously adapted older forms of historical scholarship. Ranke did not invent archival research, nor was critical reading of sources new even to the scholars of the Republic of Letters. Similarly, Gibbon did not invent the modern footnote, and commentaries of texts is not unique to Renaissance Europe.

This is the kind of book that needs to be read cover to cover in order to follow the narrative. Fortunately, it's an easy and occasionally entertaining read. The biggest problem that stood out to me was Grafton's limited focus on European scholarship, descending primarily from the Romans and Greeks. He mentions once that the Persians in the BC era may have used documentary sources to write their histories, but this sentence leaves a world of scholarship hanging. The Persians were one of the connective nodes in the trans Eurasian cultural and intellectual crossings. While it would have required a knowledge of Eastern historiography, investigating Persian and Chinese methods and how those interacted with Classical, Medieval, and especially Enlightenment European methods would bring a lot to this work.

Regardless of what I consider to be a limited geographical focus, Grafton does move beyond the Renaissance and engages with historical writings of the early common era and slightly before. This is a great book for students of history, particularly those who write in academic or professional settings. I would also recommend it to any reader interested in the history of Western historiography, European intellectual history, and the history of printing.

[Amy Blair · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like others have noted, this is less the history of the footnote as a broader history of historiography, specifically aiming to bridge the gap between (or synthesize) the historiography of 'history as art' and 'history as science', and to illuminate the messy development of modern citation and research methodology. Grafton achieves this, and I think his conclusions are sound and insightful. And unlike a lot of others here, I was not put off at all by the contents themselves—I find this stuff interesting, that's why I read the book.

My three stars are more subjective. I just find the way Grafton has written and structured this book quite unpleasant. He has organized it in such a way that the reader is left basically unsure of where he is taking them, and he frequently leads them down dead ends before—and always before—he points out that they were indeed dead ends. Maybe he puts it well in his own critique of Pierre Bayle: "readers often found themselves trapped in a sort of morass of erudition". He finishes with a strong set of conclusions, and I was happy to have finished it because he does actually arrive at a destination. But my preference is for an introduction that essentially charts the course, rather than a book that is seemingly written as a cascading rumination.

Grafton is also flowery—he likes anecdotes and analogy and cute little similies. I don't mind flowery, but he is often flowery in all the wrong places, packing basic information on either side with altogether unnecessary flourish, as though he is trying to trick you into enjoying content which really can stand on its own. Definitely my most nit-picky (and, in context, ironic) criticism is: the footnotes. So many times I interrupted myself by glancing down to find a block of Latin text he's included, I suppose, out of cheeky and self-aware thoroughness. After all, he quotes Justus Möser saying "I quoted a Hebrew word in a note—and I cannot even read the language. Isn't that pedantic?" on a page where he himself notes the entire quote block in its original German. Yes, it is a bit pedantic.

I'm still glad I read it. It was full of fascinating history, and despite perhaps being excessively witty, Grafton is at least genuinely witty. My complaints are personal ones and no reason to discredit the work itself.

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book. In fact, I own two copies. But this book is not only the history of the footnote, but a history of history. How is history written? What is its relationship with literature? What is its relationship with science and the/a scientific method?

Put another way, how is validity built - and confirmed?

This book explores the role and place of the footnote in building an understanding of the past, for the present. The elegance of this history, like the elegance of footnotes, remain ignored and marginalized in our (post)reading age. But connecting again with the textures of writing and evidence offers a defiant way to carry the best of writing and scholars in the past and allow them to enliven our present scholarship.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grafton doesn't so much give a history of the footnote as to circle around it. His main points are that the origin of the footnote is neither as simple or as recent as is usually assumed. I find it interesting that both the Grafton and Zerby books on footnotes rely so much on humor--it is as if they fear their interest in the topic being taken for humourless pedantry.

[Sycamore · Rating 3 out of 5]

it's alright. i still don't understand where the footnote originated, and i still care about as much as when i was initially forced to read this book. tries to be too clever. grafton's writings on edward gibbon and his occasional biographical sketches of renaissance historians are the best parts.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great idea, but it could have been written in a much better way. It's more of a book about the history of ideas (which is also an interesting topic, but not what I was expecting to read about) rather than the history of footnotes.

[Jason Pym · Rating 2 out of 5]

Much more dry than I was led to believe, and seemed to be all about Gibbon and Ranke. A bit dissappointing, but a nice idea.

[Adrienne · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a story about historians and historiographers arguing and not so much about the footnotes themselves.

[Thomas Isern · Rating 4 out of 5]

The highlight of this work, for me, comes on pp. 102-03, when Hume writes to Gibbon's publisher, William Strahan, insisting that Gibbon's endnotes must be converted into footnotes. Strahan complies! And the inimitable notes composed by Gibbon come forth, over his own objections, as the stuff of literary legend. This episode is a touchstone.

My principal takeaway from Grafton's book is a metaphorical conception of the apparatus of annotation. Even though I dislike his metaphor, that of notes as a platform or support structure for an edifice. That is too stationary and sterile, I thought, so I sought my own analogy, and came up with a better one. Grafton nicely conveys the idea of annotation as a parallel narrative. Historical action takes place in the text; the story of the researcher's encounter with the subject, his conception of the narrative, and his critique of the sources unfold in the notes. My analogy sees the footnotes not as base, but as bass. Situated physically on the page where a bass line is situated on a score, the notes (notes!) are a moving sounding of depth, always there under the more prominent narrative. The bass notes often are contrapuntal, but always resonantly supportive, keeping pace with the narrative to keep it from tipping.

A couple of favorite usages I will appropriate: the culter flacianus (162) and bella diplomatica (167).

I appreciate Grafton's remarks on Ranke and the origin of the historical seminar and his recognition that one of Ranke's sterling qualities was empathy.

As others have observed, this work is less historical than epistemological, that is, it charts how scholars came around to the realization that assertions cannot just stand by declamation, but must be supported. The course of this realization is tortuous, but the reader who bears with it is rewarded in the end with Grafton's final few pages of conclusion. In part:

Historians' practices of citation and quotation have rarely lived up to their precepts; footnotes have never supported, and can never support, every statement of fact in a given work. No apparatus can prevent all mistakes or eliminate all disagreements. Wise historians know that their craft resembles Penelope's art of weaving: footnotes and text will come together again and again, in ever-changing combinations of patterns and colors. Stability is not to be reached. Nonetheless, the culturally contingent and eminently fallible footnote offers the only guarantee we have that statements about the past derive from identifiable sources. And that is the only ground we have to trust them.

Only the use of footnotes and the research techniques associated with them makes it possible to resist the efforts of modern governments, tyrannical and democratic alike, to conceal the compromises they have made, the deaths they have caused, the tortures they or their allies have inflicted. . . . Only the use of footnotes enables historians to make their texts not monologues but conversations, in which modern scholars, their predecessors, and their subjects all take part. (233-34)

[Delia Turner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though I do not generally read history, I apparently like to read historiography, and though my graduate work is long behind me, I still enjoy reading about the culture and quirks of academia. I also love using footnotes. So after I finished Academia Obscura, I hunted down this book, which was mentioned in passing.

It is a scholarly work, and often assumes a depth of knowledge about the study of history that I do not have. A good third of most pages is made up, indeed, of footnotes, often giving a referenced passage in its original French, Latin, or German. I found myself learning more about Leopold von Ranke than I ever wanted to know, since he apparently is given credit by many for originating the "double narrative" of historical writing where the argument is made in the main text while the substantiation and counter-arguments are made at the dense, small-font bottom of the page, since "Each serious work of history must now travel on an impregnably armored bottom, rather like a tank." (56)

What kept me laboring along? First, historians avoid merely being story-tellers and attempt to establish the veracity of their assertions by reference to primary sources. Second, historians writing about other historians often produce marvelous nuggets of prose like the one at the end of the previous paragraph. Third, historians are quirky, argumentative, whimsical lunatics like anyone in any other profession.* And fourth, as I suspected, part of why footnotes became so popular in the practice of history was that they were already very popular in fiction and commentary, being used for sarcastic commentary and personal attack as well as for simple comic effect.

It's only three stars because I can't really recommend it to anyone else despite its rigor and reference to original material. It's hard to follow and the second half of the book is less coherent and pithy than the first half. But I have marked many passages and will save them to trot out later when attempting to impress others with my erudition.

*Gottlieb Wilhelm Rabener published a dissertation consisting only of footnotes, for instance (120).

[Fred Jenkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is and isn't about footnotes. Grafton ranges more broadly into the use of primary and archival sources by historians, and documentation practices including in-text references and appendices as well as footnotes. There is much on modern historiography in general. Grafton begins with and gives the lion's share of space to Leopold von Ranke (so much of the scholarly world used to revolve around nineteenth-century Germans!). Then he works backward through Edward Gibbon, Jacques-Auguste de Thou, Athanasius Kircher, and Pierre Bayle. Others make cameo appearances, such as Richard Bentley and David Hume. There are lots of interesting odds and ends (I hadn't known that Ranke once studied with the great philologist Gottfried Hermann).

As usual with Grafton, there are some wonderful asides and even zingers:

"One who wishes to learn how a sixteenth-century classroom differed most pungently from a modern one should not only examine Petrus Ramus' popular textbooks, but also ponder his biographer's statement that he bathed once a year, at the summer solstice."

"the German exile Karl Benedikt Hase, a brilliant lexicographer and deft forger whose diary, in classical Greek, affords unique guidance through the brothels and cafés of Balzac's Paris"

And on Ranke himself:

"He composed his text as a whole. Only then did he search his books and notes, extracts and summaries, for the evidence to support it: he used a salt-shaker to add references to an already completed stew."

Who knew that the slovenly research practices of modern undergraduates (and not a few professors) are in the direct tradition of the great Ranke!

[Sara · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a required text for class, I didn't start reading this book with high expectations, but I quickly learned those expectations should have been even lower. Grafton, despite his profession, is not a terribly effective writer A scholar and historian he may be, but bestselling author? Not so much. The Footnote haphazardly takes us from the dusty archives of the 18th and 19th centuries to the tomes of classical historians and back again. While the purported intent is to elucidate on the history of the literary device of the footnote, Grafton instead seems to be recording a history of historiography and the development of citation. A clearly erudite tone often wavers into hubris. This detracts greatly from the enjoyment of the piece, as well as the unorganized structure of the book. In addition, Grafton's overconfidence seems to fail him when he makes assertions based on presumptions, without citing any source that supports his opinions. The irony of this is that Grafton too often points out the flaws of past historians – particularly that of not citing assertions or citing those assertions incorrectly (whether purposefully or out of ignorance it is usually unknown, according to Grafton). Perhaps I am not the audience he aspired to write to, but it would have been more effective had Grafton improved his organization, focus, and overall writing style. The topic wasn't nearly as bad as how Grafton approached it. I admit that I did learn a bit about the development of scholarship in the context of historical literature, but the convoluted narrative provided by Grafton did more to confuse than inform me.

[Annika · Rating 4 out of 5]

I second those who point out that this book is not really a history of footnotes or citation practices. It's a collection of rambling anecdotes about footnotes and historical practices over time, largely amassed to point out that there is no one origin of the footnote or of modern historical practices as a whole. For thousands of years, there have been some historians who cited their sources and some who didn't, some who focused on compiling documents and some who wrote synthetic narratives, some who wrote and researched in good faith and others who explicitly started with an argument and then found documents that backed them up. Ultimately, Grafton argues that footnotes, while fallible, are essential because they make clear that there is a "double story" in any historical text: the author's interpretation of historical sources and the story of the research itself.

Despite the lack of structure, I enjoyed the book immensely. You'll learn fun stories about ancient big-name historians, everyone from Josephus and Livy to Gibbon, Bayle, and Ranke, plus stories of the comedic/satirical footnote, the stab-colleagues-in-the-back footnote, the footnote as defense/justification of political/religious aims, footnotes as attempts to disguise lies and forgeries, footnotes that are just there to show membership in the historical guild, and good faith footnotes designed to lead the reader to the sources.

[Vincent Hernot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful: wonderful idea, wonderful scholarship, wonderful style.
Ok, that last is at times debatable: by trying to bring together very disparate elements without loading his paragraphs, h sometimes goes from A to D in a flash - too quickly. And his sentences are sometimes very high-concept, said lightly but nonetheless, so this is not the easiest of reads.
But he does have a real pen, he can be very funny (he is very funny), and incredibly learned.
And this is a fascinating history, honestly, and the footnote is really a way for him to asl very serious questions of the nature of truth, scholarship, what we can now from those sources, about cheating with the truth, about forging sources...Wonderful.

[Flo Rence · Rating 1 out of 5]

Great first chapter, then downhill.
.
It´s undeniable how entertaining and smart the introductory chapter is, but everything that follows is extremly dense, boring, needless, and digressive. It´s not so much a history of the footnote as a navigational tool for representing knowledge, but a convoluted (and not in a good way) story of history scholars, focussing on the German Ranke. I couldn´t finish it because it was just the same on every page.
.
It´s sad how someone can make such a mess of a super interesting topic. I´m curious about two other footnote-exploring books: The Devil´s Details and Bookparts. Sadly, Grafton´s doesn´t serve at all.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

I admire Anthony Grafton and had meant to read this book for many years. I was surprised when finally getting to it to discover, though, as several other readers have pointed out, how narrow Grafton's focus here is. This is not a history of the footnote in general but a book on the uses of footnotes in by academic historians—a subject that loses much of its interest if you're not a member of that particular guild. Grafton is, as always, witty, erudite, learned—but also, in this case, quite dull.

[Don · Rating 1 out of 5]

Anyone thinking this book might be a light, peculiar and fascinating journey into footnotes will be disappointed. It has little to do with footnotes, and more to do with a history of attribution—and that history is heavy on academic obscurity and long quotes from German professors of centuries gone by.

What's worse is that instead of organizing his history of attribution chronologically, he organizes it in reverse chronological order.

Chapter 1 is a nice summary, but the ensuing chapters are a black hole of academic masturbation.

[E · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is not at all what I was expecting. It is not a history of the footnote. It is a history of a few European scholars of the past 300 years and how they did or did not play nicely with others, raid the archives, and show their work. It's almost like Grafton had a few obscure figures he wanted to highlight, and used the conceit of the footnote to tie them together. He writes well, but I found my interest flagging. If this is what he set out to do, he did it well, hence the three stars; but I was unimpressed.

[Lukerik · Rating 3 out of 5]

So this is a book that exists. Such a random subject I knew on sight I had to read it. Thought it might be a bit silly, or boring, but it’s neither. Actually rather interesting. He works backwards though time tracing the development of the footnote in history writing, which is apparently where it all began. On the way he branches out into looking at supporting documentation and historians eventually recognising the need for it, and there’s all sorts of snippets of interesting stuff that’s only tangentially related. It’s more a history of writing history and very smoothly written.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was not quite what I expected, because it's specifically about the use of footnotes in historical writing. I was hoping it would be more of a book-historical treatment. But it's fascinating and extremely readable.

[Tony Gualtieri · Rating 5 out of 5]

In which a reverse-chronological history of textual annotation becomes a fascinating exposition on the nature of historical knowledge.

[Susanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Epilogue beginning on page 223 is fruitful reading; the rest is highly specialized and best skimmed for someone like me.