{"id":18264,"date":"2019-11-20T11:43:07","date_gmt":"2019-11-20T19:43:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=18264"},"modified":"2019-11-20T11:43:07","modified_gmt":"2019-11-20T19:43:07","slug":"on-footnotes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2019\/11\/20\/on-footnotes\/","title":{"rendered":"On footnotes"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Just finished with Anthony Grafton\u2019s nonfiction book <cite>The Footnote<\/cite>.<\/p>\r\n<p>I think someone gave me this as a present a few years ago, but I forget who; sorry about that.<\/p>\r\n<p>I\u2019m also sorry to report that I am not the right audience for this book. I\u2019m mostly not the right audience for nonfiction books in general, but especially for this one.<\/p>\r\n<p>I had embarked on reading the book with the wrong expectations. I thought that it would be a history of the idea of using footnotes; to some degree, it is, but it\u2019s specifically about footnotes <em>in works written by historians<\/em>. As such, it\u2019s very concerned with many matters that don\u2019t interest me much; I would say that it\u2019s more a history of history-as-a-scholarly-discipline than it is a history of footnotes. I imagine that many historians would find this book fascinating, but despite the cover copy that seems to suggest that it\u2019s intended for a general audience, it read to me like a book written specifically for professional historians. (I suspect that it would annoy some historians, though; there are bits of snark here and there that I suspect have a kind of you-kids-get-off-my-lawn flavor, though I don\u2019t know enough about the underlying conflicts among historians to be sure of that.)<\/p>\r\n<p>The book also has a general structure that I found myself impatient with: it suggests a possible origin for footnotes-as-used-by-historians, then it spends a chapter explaining why that\u2019s not really the origin, then it suggests another possible origin, and so on.<\/p>\r\n<p>For example, chapter 1 talks about (among other things) the longstanding practice of adding glosses and annotations, especially on religious works; but then it points out that glosses aren\u2019t the same thing as footnotes-written-by-historians, because they\u2019re not written by the author of the work. (I\u2019m oversimplifying here.) Then chapter 2 discusses Leopold von Ranke, who in the early 1800s was the \u201cfirst famous practitioner\u201d of \u201cscientific history\u201d (which apparently means history based \u201con primary rather than secondary sources\u201d), and suggests that Ranke might have been the originator of the modern footnote; but over the course of the next 30 pages, Grafton explains that in fact Ranke was not the originator of the modern footnote. The next chapter, another 30 pages, explains what led Ranke to his approach to footnotes. And so on, tracing backwards, proposing possible origins and then explaining why they weren\u2019t really, until nearly 200 pages into the book, when, in the final chapter, Grafton concludes that the modern footnote-as-used-by-historians was created by Pierre Bayle, around 1700, partly in reaction to criticisms by Descartes. (Sorry if that\u2019s a spoiler.)<\/p>\r\n<p>I suspect that one could excerpt from this book a 3,000-word essay outlining the history of the footnote in much the way I was expecting. (Though that essay would include almost nothing about footnotes that occur in places other than scholarly works about history, because the book barely mentions such footnotes.) But this book isn\u2019t that essay.<\/p>\r\n<p>Not to say it\u2019s a bad book; again, I suspect that for the right audience, it\u2019s an excellent book. But alas, I\u2019m not that audience.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18264"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18265,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18264\/revisions\/18265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}