The footnote - Anthony Grafton

Many books offer footnotes to history; until now, however, no one has dedicated an entire book to the history of the footnote. But the footnote matters, as Anthony Grafton shows in this lively and erudite study, for it offers empirical support for the stories we live by. Its own story is neither so simple nor so reliable as historians like to believe. It is the creation of a varied and talented group, one that includes almost as many philosophers as historians, and numbers among its celebrated practitioners Swift, Pope and Gibbon, Rank, Hume and Hegel.At a time when popular historians are busily abandoning footnotes and novelists are as eagerly acquiring them, The Footnote shines new light on many dark recesses of literary and historical scholarship, and on the foibles and deviousness of scholars through the ages.