The Footnote (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Anthony Grafton
- First Published: 1995
- Type of Work: History
- Setting: Primarily Western Europe and Britain
- Principal Characters: Pierre Bayle, Jean Bodin, Jacob Burckhardt, René Descartes, Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Edward Gibbon, Francesco Guicciardin, David Hume, Athanasius Kircher, Justus Möser, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Leopold von Ranke, Jacques-Auguste de Thou, Friedrich August Wolf
- Genres: Criticism, Nonfiction, History
- Subjects: Europe or Europeans, Literature, Writing, Historians, Historiography, Research, Documentation
- Locales: Europe, Great Britain
The history of The Footnote: A Curious History requires a footnote of its own. The author, Anthony Grafton, Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University, wrote the manuscript in English but first published it as Die tragischen Ursprünge der deutschen Fussnot, translated into German by H. Jochen Bussmann (1995; “the tragic origins of the German footnote”). The English version of the book is a revision of the original manuscript.
Though both the German and a subsequent French translation refer to “tragic origins,” the tragedy is what footnotes have...
[The entire page is 2025 words long]
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