![]() įurther, what might be particularly appropriate for the writing of history was perhaps far less so for other forms of analysis. Moreover, extensive footnotes were increasingly viewed as a ploy to pad the text, hiding the fact that the author has little of substance to convey. For the reader, a footnote, by its nature, posed a challenge.Īh hah, footnote 4- should I now stop reading the main text and consider the footnote, or should I wait until I reach the bottom of the page?Įither way, the reading of the narrative has been interrupted. The poster child for the rise of the footnote was its use by the 18th century English historian, Edward Gibbon, who turned footnotes into a means “to amuse his friends or enrage his enemies.”īut the footnote was also the object of criticism. In considering Grafton’s book, Amelia Kennedy underscored how the footnote became a key tool in the emerging development of scholarship, particularly history, with an emphasis on the form of the narrative, where reliable support was expected for each assertion. Voilà- the footnote as a mode of textual presentation had come into being.Ĭultural historian Anthony Grafton devoted an entire book to the subsequent development of the footnote (“The Footnote: A Curious History”, here). The solution, as attributed to Richard Judge, the Queen’s Printer in the later 16th century, in connection with his producing a new Anglican Bible, was to move all notes to the bottom of the page. Once the printing press came onto the scene, however, the aesthetics of the page layout became a commercial consideration, as interlinear and marginal comments were considered unwieldly. Symbols, and not numbers, were employed, because Arabic numerals did not come into use in Europe until the end of the Middle Ages. The solution was for “gloss-writers” to use symbols that would connect between the two. However, the problem arose that if there were multiple notes on a given page, later readers often found it difficult to connect these glosses with the respective corresponding portions of the text. ![]() In medieval times, third-party glosses to a manuscript text were made by hand and placed either between the lines of the text or in the blank spaces surrounding the text. The moral of the story (with particular attention to Noël Coward): be careful what you wish for.įirst, some background. ![]() ![]() The most salient question today is not what has happened to the footnote (going, going, and increasingly gone, at least for the mainstream book publishing world), but the depressing fate of the footnote’s more recent first cousin, the endnote. Having to read footnotes resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.īeing an IP blog, this Kat will focus on the subject matter of the first part of Coward’s observation. ![]()
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