History of the footnote
Keith Windschuttle
Washington Times
December 28 1997

If most publishers today had their way, footnotes in history books would be a thing of the past. While most are happy enough to include footnotes in academic works that they expect will sell only a few hundred copies, the minute a publisher senses he might attract a wider audience he will pressure the author to either drop the notes altogether or consign them from the bottom of the page to the back of the book. For a recent popular English-language edition of one of the most famous French historical works, Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean, the footnotes were omitted entirely. For many years, the most readily available version of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was the Pelican abridged edition which also removed that work's lavish and stylish footnotes. A New York publisher told me last month that he is about to bring out a new book from which the author's copious notes have been eliminated. In compensation, the firm will put them on the Internet instead.

Publishers justify this attitude with the claim that footnotes are a pedantic detraction from the literary qualities that good history ought to embody. They set up a second line of commentary that interrupts the flow of the main narrative, undermining the illusion of veracity and immediacy that any dexterous storyteller hopes to achieve. As Noel Coward once quipped, having to read a footnote is like having to go downstairs to answer the door when in the middle of making love.

On the other hand, footnotes perform the important tasks of identifying the sources the author used and of establishing that he has actually done the research the reader expects. In other words, without references, the principal attraction of history itself, that it is not a fiction about the past, would be left unsubstantiated.

My own view is that publishers underestimate the intelligence of readers on this issue. Those who buy history books are for the most part educated people who are sophisticated enough to realise that truth claims need validation. Moreover, footnotes are optional reading. Rather than forcing the reader to stop in mid paragraph, they can be ignored at will, which is what most people do most of the time. Readers are more likely annoyed when, on those few occasions they do want to look at a reference, they have to hunt through endnotes rather than simply drop their eyes to the bottom of the page. Or, if the practice I described above becomes commonplace, they will have to log on to the Internet, load up their search engine and endure all the usual delays before they find what they want.

As an antidote to all this, anyone entering the publishing business should be forced to read Anthony Grafton's new book The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard University Press, 1997, $22.95 hardcover, 235 pages). Grafton not only shows how and why footnotes emerged as part of academic practice, he provides an excellent defence of their importance and also demonstrates that some of the best-selling authors of all time, like Edward Gibbon, were masters of the art of producing them. Grafton has produced a delightful gem of a book that will appeal to many tastes. He displays an extraordinary level of erudition, is extremely readable, frequently witty, and provides a guided tour across almost two thousand years in the development of western scholarship. Needless to say, his own footnotes are a model of their kind.

Above all, he is neither boring nor pedantic. Instead of starting at the beginning with the practice of some ancient Greek and Roman scholars who annotated their texts, he works his way backwards from the man most university courses still teach as the originator of 'scientific history', the nineteenth century German author Leopold von Ranke. Grafton shows that Ranke's reputation owes more to self promotion than scholarly practice, for he used to first write his histories as unadorned narratives and then employ secretaries to go looking for references to support his case.

Like an academic Sherlock Holmes, Grafton traces his clues as far back as the first histories of the church written soon after Christianity became the official religion of Rome. Along the way, he introduces a bevy of academic rogues, satirists and pedants who often gave the method a bad name. In 1498 the Dominican monk Annius of Viterbo published twenty four volumes of ancient history purportedly written by Babylonian and Egyptian priests, all with an elaborate network of cross references that supported each other, apparently proving that the royal families of northern Europe were descended from the ancient Trojans exiled by the Greeks. All his volumes, however, were forgeries. In the middle of the eighteenth century when enthusiasm for footnotes was at a peak, Gottlieb Wilhelm Rabener produced a dissertation called Notes Without a Text. Satirising academic values that saw less merit in writing original work than in commenting on those of others, Rabener's text consisted entirely of footnotes. The height of the German footnote fetish was reached in the 1920s at the Warburg Institute which produced the most elaborate set of historical footnotes ever written -- a set of four layers, footnotes to footnotes to footnotes to footnotes.

Grafton finds modern usage, in which documentary sources can be referenced, paraphrased and criticised within a uniform practice of citation, began with Pierre Bayle and Jean Le Clerk, two French Protestants exiled for their religious beliefs to Holland in the late seventeenth century. He argues that the Reformation was the ultimate cause of this development because Protestant scholars were forced to expend a great deal of energy on the gigantic tasks of searching for and publishing the sources that could prove what their Roman Catholic opponents called innovations were in fact restorations of original Christian belief and practice.

Though religious in origin, the techniques pioneered by Bayle and Le Clerc became within a century the mainstay of the new humanist scholarship of the Enlightenment. There were some notable recalcitrants, such as Voltaire and Hegel, but in the hands of the eighteenth century's greatest historian, Gibbon, the methodology was secured. As Grafton argues, the humble footnote has continued ever since then to be one of the pillars of the breadth of research and the freedom of expression that western culture now takes for granted.

"Only the use of footnotes and the research techniques associated with them," he argues, "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."

Modern publishers should keep this conclusion in mind every time they open a manuscript.