Over the past few weeks, several people (including my pastor) have told me a version of “I’m so glad your book uses footnotes.” True, everyone who has ever written a book will tell you, footnotes are a lot of work. But like all the best things in life, they’re worth it.
If you, like me, have a fondness for these lovely things at the bottom of a page in a good book, I recommend Princeton historian Anthony Grafton’s fun little book, The Footnote: A Curious History. It’s a history of the footnote’s evolution, use, and abuse—and this book is as quirky and delightful as anything Grafton has written. Footnotes, far from being optional extras, can be in the hands of some historians, a spicy and flavorful delight—like in the works of Edward Gibbon, for whom the combination of text and footnote became the quintessential case of business-up-front and party-in-the-back (or, well, below, in the footnotes). Gibbon had… opinions and didn’t refrain from sticking them in the footnotes, right alongside legitimate research source citations.
Grafton makes the case that more than anything, good footnotes today are the calling card of the historian’s craft—analogous to what the drill is for the dentist:
…the footnote is bound up, in modern life, with the ideology and the technical practices of a profession. One becomes a historian, as one becomes a dentist, by undergoing specialized training: one remains a historian, as one stays a dentist, if one’s work receives the approval of one’s teachers, one’s peers, and, above all, one’s readers (or one’s patients). Learning to make footnotes forms part of this modern version of apprenticeship.
Appropriately for a book about footnotes, the latter take up a good portion of many a page in this book. Still, lest anyone conclude overly optimistically what the mere presence of footnotes in a book means, Grafton concludes the book with this caveat:
Footnotes guarantee nothing, in themselves. The enemies of truth—and truth has enemies—can use them to deny the same facts that honest historians use them to assert. The enemies of ideas—and they have enemies as well—can use them to amass citations and quotations of no interest to any reader, or to attack anything that resembles a new thesis. Yet footnotes form an indispensable if messy part of that indispensable, messy mixture of art and science: modern history.
Ideas are messy, and much research goes into formulating them. But at least footnotes, when used well and for their intended purpose, show the reader that you didn’t make up the evidence (except Michael Bellesiles, in whose case the footnotes ultimately showed that yes, he did make up the evidence).