by Joe Miller
In 1697, the French phil-osopher Pierre Bayle published the first edition of Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (Historical and Critical Dictionary).
The work is notable for several reasons. Bayle’s attempt at systematizing knowledge was a major inspiration for the Encyclopedists – members of the Société des gens de lettres who published the first true encyclopedia in 1751.
Indeed, Bayle’s work would go on to influence thinkers in both the English and Scottish Enlightenments, as well as the fledgling United States – the English translation of Bayle’s Dictionnaire was one of the 100 foundational texts donated by Thomas Jefferson to form the first collection of the Library of Congress.
Bayle’s masterpiece is also notable for its format. It is one of the first scholarly works to make extensive use of footnotes.
Scholars had been adding notes to texts long before Bayle. One of my favorite notes comes from a 1420 Dutch manuscript. The scribe left the in-progress manuscript open overnight. His note on the resulting stained page reads, “Cursed be the pesty cat that urinated over this book during the night.” (I like to think that my cat – whom I’ve removed from my keyboard four times since beginning this column – is a direct descendant of that (in)famous monastery cat.)
Notes in hand-written manuscripts were typically squeezed into margins, with little in the way of organization. Once the printing press arrived, scholars needed a more systematic way to capture editorial asides.
The earliest printed footnotes are found in Richard Jugge’s 1568 printing of the Bishop’s Bible, an official Church of England-authorized translation that is mostly remembered for serving as the base text of the King James Bible that many churches use to this day.
But it was Bayle’s Dictionnaire that inspired writers to get creative with footnotes.
Alexander Pope’s 1728 poem The Dunciad began its life as a satire of his literary rivals. Those rivals wrote numerous replies, which Pope included as footnotes in later editions of the work. By the time of Pope’s final edition (1743), it was common to find pages that contained only a line or two of Pope’s poetry, followed by paragraphs of commentary.
The footnote is a particular favorite of historians. The text of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a straightforward work of history. Gibbon shows off his wit in footnotes that snark at rivals, crack dirty jokes and offer hot takes on everything from Roman emperors to current events.
John Hodgson’s multi-volume A History of Northumberland contains what’s believed to be the longest footnote in print. The 166-page note is divided into chapters and contains its own (three-page!) table of contents.
In the 20th C, footnotes crossed over into fiction. The text of J.G. Ballard’s “Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown” consists of a single ten-word sentence. The rest of the story is contained in the footnote on each word in the text. Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves uses footnotes to tell multiple narratives that sit outside the main story. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is as much endnote as text.
Their occasional appearance in avant-garde writing aside, footnotes are most commonly found in scholarly writing. The German historian Leopold von Ranke pioneered what we now call source-based history, which uses footnotes to document primary sources and to reference other scholarly works. These days, a historian who used footnotes to make smutty jokes or offer personal opinions would be dismissed as unserious.
While footnotes have been deployed for everything from scholarship to joke to literary device, one common theme unites them all. Footnotes create associations between ideas.
It’s not an accident that the footnote went mainstream in the 18th century.
Enlightenment philosophers argued that human minds work via association.
In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), David Hume argues that each idea is linked to the one before it by resemblance, contiguity or cause and effect.
Hume describes each type of association through examples: “A picture naturally leads our thoughts to the original: the mention of one apartment in a building naturally introduces an enquiry or discourse concerning the others: and if we think of a wound, we can scarcely forbear reflecting on the pain which follows it.”
For Enlightenment think-ers like Hume, ideas are all interconnected, so naturally their attempts to systematize knowledge popularized me-thods for showing interconnections.
Print doesn’t naturally lend itself to documenting complex relationships. A printed document like the one most of you are reading right now provides a single dimension for showing relationships: before and after. Footnotes and cross-referencing (another Encyclopedist innovation) are work-arounds that create additional pathways for showing relationships.
They’re clunky, but that’s the best we can do when we’re printing ideas on physical objects.
But when it comes to digital texts, there are better solutions. Next week we’ll look at the footnote’s younger, hipper cousin: the hyperlink.
joe.miller@fountaindigitalconsulting.com
