American Society of Church History

The Footnote: A Curious History by Anthony Grafton Review by: Martin E. Marty Church History, Vol. 67, No. 4 (Dec., 1998), pp. 849-850 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society of Church History Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3169931 . Accessed: 07/11/2013 09:46
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BOOK REVIEWSAND NOTES

849

(120). This is a risky historical enterprise, especially in a work of survey depth. Still, if the execution is questionable, the effort is plausible. The plausibility of Maddox's argument becomes especially clear in the excellent conclusion, where the author surveys contemporary Christian political action in Poland, East Germany,Latin America, and South Africa. So, if this book is in some ways a backwards history, marred by presentist bias and dated sources, it can perhaps serve as a catalyst for historians to return to some classical questions about the relationship between Christianity and politics, and add to their answers the sort of detail about popular culture and institutional life that eludes the author here. Jon Pahl ValparaisoUniversity The Footnote: A Curious History. By Anthony Grafton. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. xiv + 242 pp. $22.95 cloth. A History,it would be a failure, If this little book were titled The Footnote: almost a fraud. One of the last and least things it does is trace the history of the footnote from its (probably still unknown) beginnings through the rise of modern scientific history to the present chaotic situation of citation and publication. The adjective Curiousserves to characterize the effort, redeem it from failure, and make it an honest contribution, at least in the form of diversion for overworked and overspecialized historians. Those who are suspicious of books advertised as curious may fear that Grafton's will be a cute work, a trivialization of a scholarly subject, a satire on is anything but that. One might think of it as a an obvious target. TheFootnote set of elegant essays on historiographical subjects that have drawn the attention of the Princeton professor who has written Defenders of the Textand New Worlds, AncientTexts.He lets his mind and chapters-and eventually our curiosities-wander with apparently aimless ease to confront familiar and unfamiliar historical work alike. Graftondoes not explain himself in detail as he meanders from the recent (!) past, with Leopold von Ranke as his example, back through the philosophes and beyond some ecclesiastical historians to Renaissance times. Without trying to make much of a thesis for the whole book, he grounds it at the end in the beginnings: "The Cartesian Origins of the Modern Footnote." On occasion lighthearted and sometimes humorous, Grafton has not chosen this genre to display wit or satire so much as to chronicle its presence or absence. He does not overly involve himself in the endless and irresolvable disputes about where to locate footnotes or endnotes, though he does tip his hand. Curiously, he does not seem to notice that some chapters deal with authors who, while they stressed "scientific" historical documentation, did not make much use of footnotes. History?For two good reasons: It is hard to Why review this book in Church picture any historian concerned with things sacred or profane who would not find her or his curiosity aroused or pulse quickened to the excitements that come with being a historian. And one of seven chapters is devoted to "The Antlike Industry of EcclesiasticalHistorians and Antiquaries." The historians in that chapter include the polymathic German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, whom Grafton locates in Eusebian and Baronion Annales

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850

CHURCH HISTORY

traditions, and various polemical Catholic and Protestant Reformation-era chroniclers and apologists. "From the first, ecclesiastical historians wrote as controversialists and believers: as Jews seeking to prove the Toraholder than Homer or as Christians determined to prove the priority of a doctrine or an institution" (156). They taught some negative lessons that took centuries for historians-some of them, at least-to unlearn, while in their care they contributed to methods that were useful to less controversial and often belief-neutral successors into our own time. Martin E. Marty The University of Chicago, emeritus

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