

The Medieval Origins of the Modern Footnote - benbreen
http://medievalbooks.nl/2014/12/19/the-medieval-origins-of-the-modern-footnote/

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wtbob
It's fascinating to think of the mediæval scribal system as a really, really
low-bandwodth Wikipedia, with thousands of men over centuries passing notes
and slowly developing the corpus of information which underlies of modern
civilisation.

Who were those scribes who wife each of those letters with a precision which
would be the envy of an 80s dot-matrix printer? What were their hopes and
dreams? Could they have imagined an age like ours?

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slvv
Erik Kwakkel is awesome. For more on the history of footnotes, check out
Anthony Grafton's The Footnote: A Curious History ([http://www.amazon.com/The-
Footnote-A-Curious-History/dp/0674...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Footnote-A-
Curious-History/dp/0674307607)) There's also Chuck Zerby's book, The Devil's
in the Details.

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benbreen
I love Anthony Grafton! He's basically the last of the 17th century polymathic
scholars, which is fitting because that's precisely what he studies. Academics
have recently been having a debate about putting footnotes online which seems
apropos here: [https://chroniclevitae.com/news/665-wait-your-footnotes-
are-...](https://chroniclevitae.com/news/665-wait-your-footnotes-are-in-
cyberspace)

~~~
walterbell
A centralized URL is likely to go offline long before all decentralized
physical copies of a book.

A scholarly article without footnotes is like source code without
git/mercurial history. Like the long tail in search, it's not about frequency
of access, but the force of accountability that footnotes exert upon the main
text.

