Book Review

As this engaging history of the footnote opens, it appears Leopold von Ranke and Edward Gibbon will be the heroes of the apparatus criticus, but we are led step by step (or better, note by note, given Anthony Grafton's own impressive apparatus) back to less famous names in historiography, such as the Egyptian priest Manetho and the Chaldean Berosus, cultural victims of Alexander the Great. Their desire to prove the antiquity of their indigenous traditions led them to scrabble among the stone documents of their lands to produce extensively documented histories in the language of their conqueror. Even before these paleosubalterns, Krateros of Macedon (fourth century bce) visited the Athenian archives and copied out inscriptions recording the public decisions of the Athenian people. But the real heroes of the footnote for Grafton are the European humanists who devised new standards of research and proof, men such as Jacques-Auguste de Thou, who wrote the history of Europe in his own day, 1544 to 1607. De Thou, who lived through the French wars of religion, believed an impartial narrative would prove that religious toleration could heal the gashes in the body politic opened by the wars. He enlisted a vast ecumenical network of correspondents in his task, believing they could provide, through first-hand testimony and eyewitness, the most objective account of contemporary history. Despite the impressive documentation, de Thou produced his massive volumes without footnotes, because they would interrupt his pure classical narrative.

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