The Footnote: A Curious History by Anthony Grafton Review by: Michael F. Winter The Library Quarterly, Vol.

69, No. 1 (Jan., 1999), pp. 94-96 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4309272 . Accessed: 07/11/2013 09:46
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REVIEWS

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard The Footnote: A CuriousHisto7y.By ANTHONY GRAFUON. University Press, 1997. Pp. 241. $22.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-674-90214-7. For those who have often wondered but were, for one reason or another, afraid to ask, the footnote has a long, complex, and edifying history that should be better known among all of us, perhaps research and reference librarians most of all. After all, many of the sources we encounter routinely make copious use of footnotes, and they and their close relatives-endnotes, marginal glosses, citations, and other forms of annotation-perform so many useful functions that it seems incredible how little we really know about them. Perhaps this is why the author, a distinguished intellectual historian, reveals near the beginning of this fascinating, well-researched, and well-written volume that much of the literature on the topic seems much more interested in making fun of the footnote than in studying it, and why, over time, footnotes have come to be defined as "the quintessence of academic foolishness and misdirected effort" (p. 25). This negative attitude to the footnote helps explain our neglect of this essential aspect of scholarly communication, but Anthony Grafton wants to do much more, and that is to trace the development of footnoting as a scholarly practice from, roughly speaking, the beginnings of early modernism to the arrival of scientific history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though obviously related to earlier forms of annotation and punctuation found in ancient grammar, medieval theology, and philological criticism, the "historical footnote" is a new kind of creature that reflects the gradual emergence of systematic historical investigation in more modern times (p. 30). In tracing the footnote's history, he not only instructs and entertains the reader and rescues his subject handily from undeserved vilification but also makes an original contribution to modern historiography. One of the more useful benefits from reading this book is the wide-ranging understanding of the functions of annotation that it presents. Like the citations that pepper scientific papers today, the footnote allows acknowledgment of especially important others: teachers, colleagues, and academic support groups (p. 7); but unlike the in-text reference, it also provides a place where authors claim to belong to these groups. The footnote is thus a source of clues regarding what we now call the "invisible college," following historians of science like Derek de Solla Price. By extension, the footnote also often shows an author's attempt, through acknowledgment of others and their works, to define two levels of audience: a smaller and narrower community of experts and the field of knowledge their previous work has defined, as well as a broader and larger group of informed readers (p. 9). As Grafton points out, this issue of audience definition is a critical feature in understanding how writers try to strike a balance between satisfying influential erudite colleagues
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REVIEWS

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on the one hand and, on the other, reaching for eloquence of style in the effort to attract the attention of a larger readership. Indeed, much turns on the dialectic of erudition and eloquence, and the footnote becomes a kind of instrument for gauging where along the scale a given author stylisticallyfalls. Since learning how to make footnotes is part of the apprenticeship of the novice historian, the appropriate display of this ability helps identify a given work as professional and to identify the author as a legitimate authority (pp. 5, 7, 108). Still other sociological functions of footnoting have less to do with legitimation or certification and more to do with a kind of highly ritualized social interaction among scholars. The outsider, for example, can be richly entertained by public abuse of an opponent "in the form of daggers stuck in the backs of the author's colleagues. Some of these are inserted politely" (p. 8); and one can make an interesting game of trying to decipher the codes ofjudgment and dismissal that underlie the dry and seemingly dispassionate references that line scholarly texts like sharp thorns. Footnotes also "identify originators of ideas and the sources of data," a form of acknowledgment that may indicate colleague groups to which the writer does not belong socially. Indirectly, and perhaps subconsciously, they also reflect "intellectual styles of different scientific communities" and "pedagogical methods of different graduate programs" (p. 13). To sort out these different functions, of course, requires historical investigation, and is one reason why no easy answer to the question, "Why footnote?" is possible. The use of functional differences to launch some grounded speculative comparisons makes it possible to draw some very interesting conclusions. For example, by the nineteenth century, Grafton argues, most historians subscribed to the view that "the text persuades, the notes prove" (p. 15). But nowadays many historians offer proof in the text itself, where they readily include much forbidding quantitative analysis or closely argued hermeneutic exegesis. These scholars are more likely to use footnotes to acknowledge sources. Thus, depending on the writer and the age, the footnote can persuade or prove. For this and related reasons, as the author concludes in his final chapter, we must have not only a "rhetoric of narration" in our historiography but also a "rhetoric of annotation" (p. 233). In general, of course, the former is much better developed than the latter, and thus Grafton points here to an important area of future research. The second benefit for the reader is the presentation of the author's historical reconstruction of his subject's development. This presentation provides not only readability, but also a sense of the somewhat unpredictable logic of historical work itself, half art and half science, which emerges from an examination of footnoting practices over several centuries in writers as diverse as Pierre Bayle (compiler of an early historical and critical dictionary), early modern ecclesiastical and antiquarian scholars, exponents of sixteenth-century "universal histor-y"like Jacques Auguste de Thou, philosophical historians of the European enlightenment like Hume, Gibbon, and Voltaire, and, finally, the nineteenth-century forerunner of the highly polished and professionalized historical craft that we know today, Leopold von Ranke. Though far from the first to use the footnote, von Ranke connected its use securely with the scientific habit of grounding narrative in the proper usage of documents. The footnote, in other words, does not really serve its properly professional purpose unless it provides a reference to a supporting document (pp. 34-35). Not coincidentally, Ranke communicated his intense love of the archive, which he some-

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96

THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY

what romanticized, in the institutionally based historical seminar, which became from his time onward the place in which to transmit the "taste of the archive" to young scholars and thus to train succeeding generations of historical researchers (pp. 224-25). Thus did the acquisition of the craft of the footnote become linked with one of the primary forces in the professionalization process of historical research and with the rise of the modern university. Yet Ranke himself was uneasy about the footnote and retained, perhaps, some of the gentlemanly eighteenth-century prejudice against it as a technical device that disfigured the narrative and marred the literary eloquence that earlier historians worked hard to achieve. Because Ranke (1795-1886) lived almost to the end of the nineteenth century, one may forget that his origins are in a different age, a time when "gentlemen must write as they rode-with great skill but no apparent effort" (p. 225). But he was not the first to have "footnotes forced upon him" (p. 71); much the same had occurred to Edward Gibbon, whose famous ironic and often devastatingly sarcastic notes had originally appeared only at the end of the where their pointed erudition first edition of his Declineand Fall of theRomanEmpire, would detract less from the celebrated eloquence. But Hume complained, and in the second edition Gibbon placed the notes at the bottom of the page, where Hume thought they rightly belonged (pp. 103 ff). There is much more here than a review can suggest, and the coverage is not limited to the better-known figures mentioned here. Important in their time, largely forgotten now, they are useful reminders of how the bell tolls for us all. Despite its own impressive erudition and eloquence, Grafton's most lasting contribution is showing that scholarly documentation is an essential feature of the practice of scholarship, and thus an important aspect of the behavior of scholars. This provides a much-needed link between intellectual history and the sociology of intellectual life, two fields which have long been in need of rapprochement. Michael F. Winter, ShieldsLibrary,University of California,Davis

Desire. Club,Literary A FeelingforBooks:TheBook-of-the-Month Taste, and Middle-Class Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. 424. ByJANICE A. RADWAY. $29.95 (cloth). ISBN: 0-8078-2357-0. Janice Radway'sseminal book, ReadingtheRomance(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), has been an important work for scholars in American studies, sociology, cultural studies, as well as literary and social studies of the book. In it, Radway provided a model for studying how most people read and make sense of books and helped to legitimate the study of popular literature. In her latest work, A FeelingforBooks,Radwaycontinues to cross disciplinary boundaries in both subject and method and again aims to champion readers and books that fall outside the higher reaches of the literary hierarchy. Radway has turned her attention to the middlebrow culture that developed in the early twentieth century, a cultural hybrid that combined the production and distribution methods of mass-produced low culture with a belief in the educative and status-conferring qualities of high culture. To explore middlebrow culture, she examines one of its preeminent institutions, the Book-of-the-Month Club (BOMC). Radway's book is complex in both organization and argument. She divides her work into three sections. The first part is an ethnography of the time Radwayspent at the BOMC's offices during 1986 and 1987. The second and longest section is a

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