The Footnote: A Curious History by Anthony Grafton Review by: Lorraine Daston Isis, Vol. 90, No. 3 (Sep.

, 1999), pp. 571-572 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/237239 . Accessed: 07/11/2013 09:46
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BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS,90: 3 (1999) Science in Public admirablymanagesto be both. This volume makes a valuablereferenceworkor textbook for any science studies scholar or teacher who examines historical or contempobetweenprofessionalscientists raryrelationships and that protean, omnipresent constituency known as The Public. Jane Gregory and Steve Miller have focused primarily on the AngloAmerican world, mentioning European PUS projects and scholarshiponly briefly and Latin America, Asia, and Africa hardly of all (partly in because these regions arenot well represented But the peculiaritiesof newsthe PUS literature). paperscience reporting,popularbooks by celebrity scientists,television shows, and science museums are all duly covered. Of note to historians of science, the book sketches the evolution of the popularizationof science from the Enlightenmentto the present. Gregoryand Miller single out several mileposts in this evolution: Buffon's Natural History, for its literaryliberties;MichaelFaraday's1848 lectures, "The Chemical History of a Candle,"for their down-to-earth appeal; and the London quality newspapers' active role in making Einstein's theoryof relativitya householdword.Although the descriptionsof these historicalcases are brief and derived from secondary sources, they show how scientists have always shared their knowledge with lay audiences. Technical knowledge, then, is not as timeless as scientists believe it to be; the form, content, and motivations behindpopularization have always adapted to shifting wider culturalvalues. Using contemporarycase studies-the scare over the use of the pesticide Alar on American apples andthe dangers,real or perceived,of mad cow disease in Great Britain-Gregory and Miller point out that many popular representations of science portray active controversy. Whethercreated by scientists or by journalists, these accounts are not simply the watered-down remnants of certain knowledge but the roughand-readyportraitsof what Bruno Latourcalls "science in the making." This dynamic is responsible for much of the conflict between scientists and media outlets over the quality of science coverage. Scientists worried about their image would ratherthe public saw only readymade science such as the Nobel Prize awards. The public, althoughinclined to trust scientists, is still often confused by conflicting claims offered with few cues abouthow to interpret them. The familiar social forces of credibility and respect have more to do with the public assessment of scientificcontroversiesthandoes criticalevaluation of the empirical data. This insight could

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nicely inform analysis of earlier controversies and instances of popularization. Science in Public also charts the growth of scholarshipabout science popularization.After frequent surveys measuring the ignorance of most nonscientists about matters scientific, the field continues to emphasize (in close alliance with the scientific establishment)increasingscientific literacy.Gregoryand Miller make a compelling, measured case for moving PUS scholarship beyond the promotion of science to a more critical, if still sympathetic,programthat accountsfor the situatednatureof public interest in and use of scientific information. The science wars between the champions of socially grounded,contextualanalysisof science and membersof the scientificestablishmentwho label such work as dangerouslyantisciencehave only recently simmered down. Although Gregory andMiller advocatethe contextualapproach, the evenhandedness of Science in Public provides a welcome calm amid the maelstromof ad hominem attacks. Their express goal is to sugto PUS acceptableto all parties, gest an approach and given the broadscope of theirbook, they are able to tie together many loose threadswithout glibness, surely an importantstep toward a unification of the field.
STEVENALLISON-BUNNELL

Anthony Grafton. The Footnote: A Curious History. xiv + 242 pp., index. Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1998. $22.95. In this witty and eruditestudy Anthony Grafton describes how that historian's craft par excellence, the footnote, came to be an indispensable feature of the scholarly text. Grafton distinguishes the genuine historicalfootnote from the annotation,commentary,and gloss: only when the footnote is evidentiaryratherthanexpository does it come of age, disclosing sources rather than clarifying texts or acknowledging authorities. While pursuing his bottom-of-the-page quarryGraftonprovidesa historyin miniatureof the ideals and above all the practices of critical history-history that aspiresto honesty and solidity, if not to sempiternaltruth.The book is of interestto historiansof science on at least three counts: first, as the story of a knowledge-producing practicenow as entrenchedas laboratory notebooks; second, as a record of an important episode in the developmentof disciplinarystandardsof proof; and third,as a meditationon the means and ends of writing history. Graftonbegins where disciplinarymythology

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BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS,90: 3 (1999) were responding to the Cartesiancontempt for historyand otherforms of eruditionexpressedin the Discours de la methode (1637) with a page borrowedfrom Descartes's own book: enlist extreme skepticism in the service of granite-firm proof. More generally, Bayle's fortress of footnotes was part of the seventeenth-century preoccupation with new foundationsand standards of evidence and proof in a wide range of sciences. Graftonbelieves that evidence and eloquence in history need not be immiscible, and his book epitomizes this lesson: exemplary footnotes combined with a lively, colorful narrative.He makes a very serious point with humor and verve, namely, that there is a vast historicalterritory between the nihilism of those who meld fact and fiction and the dourpositivism of those who want only facts-and that the view from the middle groundis delightful.
LORRAINE DASTON

locates the origins of critical history, with Leoschool of pold Ranke and the nineteenth-century earnestarchive-hounds he founded.But Grafton quickly demolishes Ranke's claims to precedence in the matterof the footnote (and, for that matter,archivalresearch),while at the same time portrayingRanke in vivid, sympatheticcolors. Far from being the bloodless positivist of recent caricature,Ranke worried that footnotes would cramphis literarystyle and distractreadersfrom the headlongpace of the historicalnarrative. No historiancan readRanke's descriptionof the delights of the Roman archives (one of Grafton's many splendidly chosen quotations) without sighing in deepest collegial empathy. But if Ranke is not the hero of the footnote saga, then who is? Grafton leads us steadily backward: firstto EdwardGibbon'scopious, sardonic, and sometimesribaldfootnotes to the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, then to Jacques-Auguste de Thou's brave and fairminded attempt to document the rights and wrongs of the French wars of religion, then to the ecclesiastical historiansand antiquaries such as Athanasius Kircher, and finally to Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1696), which Bayle himself had originallyconceived as a dictionaryof otherhistorians'errors until wiser heads (including Leibniz) persuaded him to undertakesomething more positive. It is one of the sly charms of this book that Grafton tells his story not forward,in the mannerof almost all historicalnarrative, butrather backward, from nineteenthcenturyto seventeenthcentury, in the manner of actual historical research, in which we are always tugged furtherand further back into the past in searchof origins. Although part of Grafton's point is to show thatthe history of the footnote is a "palimpsest," layering "researchtechniquesframedin the Renaissance, critical rules first stated during the Scientific Revolution, the irony of Gibbon, the empathy of Ranke, and the savagery of [Heinrich] Leo" (p. 229), he does single out Bayle's of notes to the Dictionnaire as thick substratum a turning point. Bayle insisted on full and accuratecitations,checked sources againstone another, weighed argumentson all sides of scholarly controversies, carefully distinguished among multiple editions of the same work, and of historicalproof, in shortestablishedstandards despite his latter-dayreputationas a pyrrhonist. His medium of proof was the footnote, and sometimes even footnotes to footnotes (footnotettes, perhaps, on the analogy of epicyclettes?). Grafton suggests that Bayle and the historians who followed in his footnote-steps

Amy R. W. Meyers (Editor).Art and Science in America: Issues of Representation. viii + 208 pp., frontis., illus. San Marino, Calif.: HuntingtonLibrary,1998. $15 (paper). Naturalhistory as a scientific discipline is making a comeback after having been in eclipse for a good part of this century. Concern over the of the decline of biodiversityandthe degradation environmentis responsible for much of the renewed interest, but so is a nostalgia for a time when life scientists consideredmore thananimal natuparts (usually in solution). Contemporary ralists, such as E. 0. Wilson, proudlyaffirmtheir affiliation with a traditionthat has its modem origins in the monumental works of Linnaeus and Buffon, and so it should be no surprisethat scholarsareturningtheirgaze to the dusty annals of naturalhistoryand discoveringits rich legacy. of intellectualacSymposia are good barometers tivity, and "Artand Science in America:Issues held at the HuntingtonLiof Representation," brary in March 1994 and now incarnatedin a book of the same title (edited by the curatorof Americanartat the HuntingtonLibrary,Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens),reflects the revival of interestin the history of naturalhistory as well as one facet of its diverse range of subjects. The organizers of the symposium wanted to highlight the relationship of the Huntington's impressivecollection to the historyof science by focusing on ways in which two-dimensionalrepresentationsof the naturalworld contributedto

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