Though I do not generally read history, I apparently like to read historiography, and though my graduate work is long behind me, I still enjoy reading about the culture and quirks of academia. I also love using footnotes. So after I finished Academia Obscura, I hunted down this book, which was mentioned in passing.

It is a scholarly work, and often assumes a depth of knowledge about the study of history that I do not have. A good third of most pages is made up, indeed, of footnotes, often giving a referenced passage in its original French, Latin, or German. I found myself learning more about Leopold von Ranke than I ever wanted to know, since he apparently is given credit by many for originating the "double narrative" of historical writing where the argument is made in the main text while the substantiation and counter-arguments are made at the dense, small-font bottom of the page, since "Each serious work of history must now travel on an impregnably armored bottom, rather like a tank." (56)

What kept me laboring along? First, historians avoid merely being story-tellers and attempt to establish the veracity of their assertions by reference to primary sources. Second, historians writing about other historians often produce marvelous nuggets of prose like the one at the end of the previous paragraph. Third, historians are quirky, argumentative, whimsical lunatics like anyone in any other profession.* And fourth, as I suspected, part of why footnotes became so popular in the practice of history was that they were already very popular in fiction and commentary, being used for sarcastic commentary and personal attack as well as for simple comic effect.

It's only three stars because I can't really recommend it to anyone else despite its rigor and reference to original material. It's hard to follow and the second half of the book is less coherent and pithy than the first half. But I have marked many passages and will save them to trot out later when attempting to impress others with my erudition.

*Gottlieb Wilhelm Rabener published a dissertation consisting only of footnotes, for instance (120). ( )

In which a reverse-chronological history of textual annotation becomes a fascinating exposition on the nature of historical knowledge. ( )

Not so much a history of the footnote as a THING, but a history of the CITATION as a practice among scholars. So, no illustrations or history of manicules, postils, margin notes, footnotes, endnotes, asterisks, superscript numerals, or Kate Turabian. Instead, a dissertation on the practice of citing sources, pushing the standard story back past Gibbon and Ranke to the classicists, humanists, and antiquarians of the Renaissance and Early Modern eras. Quite dull in places, in others, rather dull. There are glimmers of interesting facts here and there. But this is definitely the stuff of pedants and graduate students in history, not a narrative history for the masses. Now, I am a pedantic holder of a Ph.D. in history, but this was not a fun read. It would have worked well in a graduate-level historiography/theory & methods class. ( )

An unusual history of the footnote (well, maybe any history of the footnote is unusual, eh?). Much more concerned with the history of the content of the footnote rather than so much the mechanics of the footnote. ( )

From library.

More dull than I'd imagined - I didn't need something silly, but this was very uninspiring and I gave up quickly. ( )