THE FOOTNOTE: A Curious History
By Anthony Grafton
Harvard University Press, 241 pages, $22.95
I’ve never paid much attention to footnotes. For me, they’re one of the inevitable apparatuses of a certain kind of writing, a necessary evil by which historians or scholars are expected to demonstrate their research. When I think of them at all, it’s as a minor irritation, a set of odd, unwieldy appendages that break up the flow of a work. About the only time I ever felt differently was as a college student, when I appreciated their ability to shorten the pages of a particularly dull, academic text. Beyond that, however, I agree with Noel Coward, who, according to Anthony Grafton’s “The Footnote: A Curious History,” once said that having to read a footnote is like having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.
Given my sentiments, I’m surprised at the degree to which I was captivated by “The Footnote,” a charming, intelligent volume that traces the footnote’s development as a literary and historical device. Beginning in the 18th Century, when, in Grafton’s view, “the historical footnote was a high form of literary art,” the book moves systematically through various eras, identifying early practitioners and divergent forms of marginalia to pursue a lineage in which the footnote may be understood. It’s an astonishing piece of scholarly writing, not least because it allows us to reconsider a subject that might charitably be called idiosyncratic, or even obscure. Grafton admits as much in a brief preface; “So far as I know,” he notes, “no one has ever dedicated a book to the history of the footnotes that actually appear in the margins of modern historical works.”
Yet if Grafton’s primary purpose is to evaluate such overlooked material, what makes “The Footnote” work is his ability to write for a lay audience, to merge the ephemera of historical research with an accessible, nearly anecdotal, style. A professor of history at Princeton University, he is that rarest of creatures, an academic who can communicate with the rest of us, and his humor, erudition and engagement go quite some distance toward bringing this “necessarily speculative essay” alive.
Grafton establishes a witty, discursive tone from the outset, opening “The Footnote” by taking on the contradictions of the form. Footnotes, he makes clear, are not merely dry citations; “sometimes (they) afford entertainment–normally in the form of daggers stuck in the backs of the author’s colleagues.” From there, he reveals the tricks historians use to undermine their rivals, before concluding: “To the inexpert, footnotes look like deep root systems, solid and fixed; to the connoisseur, however, they reveal themselves as anthills, swarming with constructive and combative activity.”
That’s an important statement, because if footnotes possess their own agenda, we can’t help but find history subjective, a point Grafton makes explicit by referring to modern, annotated historical writing as a double narrative, in which neither text nor notes stand alone. As he explains: “The footnotes form a secondary story, which moves with but differs sharply from the primary one. In documenting the thought and research that underpin the narrative above them, footnotes prove that it is a historically contingent product, dependent on the forms of research, opportunities, and states of particular questions that existed when the historian went to work.”
There’s a subtle contextualizing component to such an argument, for much of the story line Grafton pursues is informed by exactly this sort of contingency. As “The Footnote” progresses, in fact, it becomes less an investigation of uncharted territory than an effort to deconstruct the mythos of modern historiography, and the figures who transformed the field. Of these, perhaps none is as significant as Leopold von Ranke, the 19th Century German historian and archivist who might be called the Abner Doubleday of “scientific history,” a discipline that “rests on primary rather than secondary sources: (Ranke) . . . was its first famous practitioner.” Despite Ranke’s undeniable influence in popularizing the “close, comparative study” of pre-existing histories and archival material, Grafton suggests that his place at the center of modern historical tradition is not as clear-cut as commonly understood. To explicate this, he spends much of “The Footnote” working backward, seeking the roots of Ranke’s innovations in Enlightenment writers like Gibbon and Voltaire, the ecclesiastical historians of the Renaissance and even the dark corners of antiquity.
If that sounds a bit far-ranging for a book about the simple footnote, it is–and unapologetically so. But one of the unexpected pleasures of “The Footnote” is the way Grafton uses his investigations to evoke the all-too-human history of historiography itself. Many of the most memorable moments here come in his droll characterizations of long-lost historians, or the controversies that swirled around particular works. One ancient document, Grafton reports, “has the defect of being a forgery, but also the compensating virtues of brevity and clarity”; later, another forged text is championed by 17th Century headmaster-cum-antiquarian William Camden, who is excoriated by a rival researcher for having left the “inferior province of boy-beating.”
What’s interesting is how little certain issues have changed, a situation cast in stark relief by the story of Flacius, a church historian who, in the 1550s, received money from the Protestant hierarchy only to be attacked by his contemporaries for allegedly having misappropriated the funds. “Church history, in other words,” Grafton comments, “spawned the first grant-supported historical research institute–and the first charges that the grant money had been wasted.”
What it all adds up to is a continuum, in which footnotes evolved as part of a process of historical and social growth. To that end, Grafton even references literary writers like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, who used parodic footnotes to ridicule opponents in works like “The Dunciad” and “Battle of the Books.” It’s a refreshingly inclusive approach to a subject that seems, at first, almost unavoidably narrow, and it enlivens “The Footnote” in unexpected ways. By incorporating such a broad perspective, after all, Grafton makes of his subject not just source but substance, “(a) palimpsest (that) 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.”
