Abstract

Footnotes seem to rank among the most colorless and uninteresting features of historical practice. In fact, however, footnoting practices have varied widely, over time and across space, between individuals and among national disciplinary communities. Little clarity has prevailed in the discussion of the purpose footnotes serve; even less attention has been devoted to the development they have undergone. This essay sketches the history of the footnote in the Western historical tradition. Drawing on classic work by A. D. Momigliano, H. Butterfield, and others, it shows that critical research into and argument about sources have long formed part of the historical tradition. Classical political historians could not insert much explicit reflection about the use of sources into their work without violating the rhetorical rules they accepted. But their histories, as the case of de Thou shows, often rested on careful critical work. And the many historians who did not provide instructive narratives of war and high politics, but rather, accounts of local history or religious institutions, discussed their sources, and sometimes quoted them extensively. These varied traditions were only integrated, however, by the invention of the footnote in its modern form, which made it possible to combine a high literary narrative with erudite investigations. The footnote in its modern form seems to have been devised in the seventeenth century, as part of an effort to counter skepticism about the possiblity of attaining knowledge about the past. It was used to great intellectual and literary effect in the eighteenth century, when individuals as different as Gibbon and Möser made the foundations of their texts into elaborate mosaics of erudite research and ironic reflection. Ranke did not invent, but dramatized, the historical footnote. He made the research that produced it as vital to the historian's culture and as central to the historian's achievement as the high style that had distinguished pragmatic exemplar history of the traditional kind. The historical footnote emerges not as a simple trademark guaranteeing quality nor as a uniform piece of scholarly technology, but rather as the product of long collective struggles and individual efforts to devise a visibly critical form of historical writing