The Devil's Details Read Free Page B

Ibid., p. 84.
Chapter 5
    1. Peter Gay,
Style in History
(New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 74.
    2. L. von Ranke,
Idas Brifwerk
, ed. W. P. Fuchs (Hamburg, 1949), p. 194. Quoted in Anthony Grafton,
The Footnote: A Curious History
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 36. (Grafton’s annotation is not as fulsome as one might wish, as I indicated before.) With Ranke, Grafton gives another one of those succinct tour-de-force descriptions of a life, work, and personality that appear throughout The Footnote . I have borrowed a great number of his facts and antidotes; our interpretations of them differ dramatically: For the most part, he approves of what happened to the footnote in Ranke’s hands; I entirely disapprove.
    3. G. Stanton Ford, “
A Ranke Letter
,” Journal of Modern History 32 (1960), p. 143. Quoted in Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 64. Many writers, and particularly many scholarly writers, might not feel the need to repeat the Grafton citation in full even though the reader may have to hunt a bit for it. That parsimony is a mistake. Notes should be reader-friendly; a book should not emulate a supermarket in which the bread is at one end of the store and another common purchase—say, cheese—is at the other. A reader is not a customer who may buy on impulse if required to wander the store (or story). When in doubt, footnote fully.
    4. For a full account of this episode, see Anthony Grafton,
The Footnote: A Curious History
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 40-4.
    5. Ranke,
Tagebucher
, p. 233. Quoted in Peter Gay,
Style in History
(New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 68. Gay’s citations can be as terse as Grafton’s.
    6. Peter Gay,
Style in History
(New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 64.
    7. Quoted in Anthony Grafton,
The Footnote: A Curious History
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 66. In one library copy of The Footnote I found scrawled in pencil after “learned ladies” a sarcastic “Thanks a lot.” The writer, presumably a woman, was quite justified. Though the long-dead Leo will not benefit, other readers, myself included, can only benefit from the highlighting of such egregious sexism. In a wonderfully digressive footnote, Grafton goes from Ranke’s note-taking to the Renaissance historian Jacob Burckhardt’s note-taking to the suggestion: “Next to the unwritten history of annotation that haunts historical libraries’ walls is the ghost of the even thicker history of note-taking ….” (p. 46, note 19). Such a history ought to pay some attention to the note making of anonymous readers who in a more modern age imitate the commentary found scrawled on medieval manuscripts.
    8. L. Ranke, “
Replik
,” Intelligenzblatt der Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung 131 (May 1828), cols. 193-199, at 195-196 n. Quoted in Anthony Grafton,
The Footnote: A Curious History
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 66. English translation by Grafton.
    9. Leopold von Ranke,
History of the Popes: Their Church and State
, vol. 3, trans. E. Fowler (New York and London: The Co-Operative Publication Society, 1901), p. 220.
    10. Ibid.
    11. Ibid., p. 220.
    12. Ibid., p. 221.
    13. Ibid.
    14. Leopold von Ranke,
History of the Popes: Their Church and State
, vol. 2, trans. E. Fowler (New York and London: The Co-Operative Publication Society, 1901), p. 265.
    15. Ibid.
    16. See the editor’s forward to Leopold von Ranke,
The Theory and Practice of History
, ed. Georg G. Iggers and Konrad von Moltke (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), p. vii. Note also Grafton’s comment “… Ranke became the academic historian par excellence ….” Anthony Grafton,
The Footnote: A Curious History
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 34.
    17. Peter [sic] Bayle,
The Dictionary, Historical and