Good Protestant that he was, the sixteenth-century English printer Richard Jugge was a believer in the immutable word of God and that the faithful were afforded salvation through the inviolate letters of scripture alone. Through reading the gospels, the good Christian could find their heavenly reward, not in donation, or morality, or good works. Jugge was ordained in that priesthood of all believers composed of all those who were baptized – no need for black-clad priests to keep the Bible locked away in Latin, because any pious Englishman could well enough read the words for him (or her)self, so that the most humble boy plowing the field knew as much chapter and verse as the Pope himself. The meaning of scripture was simple, straight-forward, and literal.
But…. sometimes any reader could use some help interpreting the finer points of Hebrew or Koine translation. And… anyone could be forgiven for needing the guidance of expertise to better comprehend what exactly it was that God wanted them to do, think, believe, and feel. What was needed was some explication. Some explanation. Some interpretation. So Jugge, laying the copper keys into his printing press to produce copies of the official Bishop’s Bible translation in 1568, faced a bit of a conundrum. How were stolid English Protestants to properly read – of their own accord – a book written by ancient Jews millennia ago? How could such a foreign book be applied to the great theological disputes of the day, from the nature of the Eucharist to the finer points of double predestination? His solution was in the details, or rather their margins, for in Richard Jugge’s printshop located just north of St. Paul’s Cathedral and just downward from heaven was birthed the Reformation’s most enduring contribution to typography – the footnote.[1]
God may have supplied the Word, but Jugge was content to supply the gloss (or at least the typographic organization of it). Jugge’s footnotes, it should be emphasized, were certainly not the first instance of written commentary on scripture (or other books) included within a volume itself. “Notes in the margin and between the lines — so-called glosses — had featured in written documents since time immemorial,” writes Keith Houston in Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. Marginalia has a venerable history in both manuscript and print, and there is a tradition of using the white space of the page’s border to draw attention to something within the text, from the creatures and monsters populating the illustrations of the Book of Kells, beings who sometimes point and mock transcription errors, to the curious symbol of the manicule, a drawing of a hand looking a bit like one of Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python animations, which gestures to the important bits within a book. “But no traditional form of annotation — from the grammarian’s glosses to the theologian’s allegories to the philologist’s emendations – is identical to the historical footnote,” historian Anthony Grafton reminds us in his invaluable study The Footnote: A Curious History.
Along with other typographical devices that are separate from the main text, from epigraphs to bibliographies, I’ve always had an affection for the lowly footnote. Anybody who has ever had to do advanced academic work has a love/hate relationship with the form; the way in which the piling up of footnotes and endnotes exhibits deep reading (or the performance of it), the scholarly equivalent of getting a stamp in your passport, but also the confusing tangle of references, citations, and long-ago academic debates that a young researcher must tip their cap to in due-deference, which can be a perfunctory slog at best. Footnotes can be an exercise in arid, sober, boring credit-giving, but some of the most dynamic monographs have the best stuff squired away in the footnotes. One of my favorite footnotes is in Stephen Booth’s masterful New Critical close readings of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, whereby regarding a particularly contentious biographical issue, the editor notes that “Shakespeare was almost certainly homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual.” Looking for such treasure within the footnotes — digressions, jokes, insecurities, reflections, meditations, disagreement, discourse, conversation, and snark in addition to reference, citation, credit, and acknowledgement — is like a form of textual beachcombing, pulling up something shiny out of a sandpile. As Bruce Anderson enthuses in the Stanford Magazine, “Footnotes allow us not only to see the prejudices of old sources, but the biases and convictions of the footnote himself. They provide readers with the intellectual map that the writer has used to arrive at her conclusions.” Footnotes are several things at once – labyrinth, but also diagram; honeycomb and map; portrait of thought and bibliographic graveyard.
Jugge’s innovation wasn’t commentary, it was knowing when to shunt commentary away at the bottom of the page. It wasn’t his Bible’s only perk, for a book is always more than the words on the page (whether such should be claimed by Protestants or New Critics). David Daniel describes the edition in his study The Bible in English, noting that Jugge’s volume was “lavish in its ornaments in initial letters, fresh title-pages with portraits, 124 distinct woodblock illustrations, and four maps.” Work on the translation which constituted the Bishop’s Bible was largely overseen by Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker who was vested by Elizabeth I with the task of making a version of scripture that, though it was in English, avoided the overly radical tone of the Geneva Bible, which had been translated by refugees who’d crowded to the Swiss canon during the reign of the queen’s sister. Daniel is less than enthusiastic about Parker’s translation, writing that “scholar though he was, [he] could not write even reasonably pleasing English.” [2] Writing poetry wasn’t the Archbishop’s goal however, for the new edition was tasked by the queen to avoid the overly Protestant affectations of previous translations.
Translation was always a sectarian affair. In choosing to call some religious authorities “elders,” or even “ministers,” rather than “priests” and in translating a word normally rendered as “gift” to the word “grace,” Protestant translators dressed the “naked sense” (as the Renaissance translator William Tyndale describe literal reading) of the Hebrew and Greek originals in Protestant clothes. That’s always the point of a footnote, to pick some form of clothing whereby the author or editor renders the text in a certain fashion. In this regard, the Bishop’s Bible (in keeping with its episcopal name) was steadfastly less Protestant than the Geneva Bible (in keeping with its steadfastly Calvinist name). “The marginal notes… are Protestant,” explains Daniel, but Parker exerted himself to “abstain from ‘bitter notes.’” If anything, the Bishop’s Bible necessitated the reduction of marginalia. Instances as when the Geneva Bible glosses Revelation 11:7, which describes the “beast that cometh out of the bottomless pit” as matter-of-factly referring to the Pope, wouldn’t find room in Jugge’s printing. In fact, most of the marginalia from the Geneva Bible wouldn’t be repeated in the Bishop’s Bible, as all of the writing which crowded around the page would be conveniently placed at the bottom.[3]
Footnotes, marginalia, and glosses such as those in the Bishop’s Bible belong to an awkward category of literature called “paratext,” the ancillary stuff that surrounds the main event of a book, which can include introductions, prefaces, prologues, afterwords, blurbs, bibliographies, copyright information, epigraphs, and even covers and author pictures, among other things. Paratext is basically all of that which can be ignored in a text but where a person can still be credibly said to have read that book in good faith (it takes a dogged completist to include ISBN information in their reading itinerary). Easy to forget that all of those accoutrements which we associate with books, but that dim in the background to mere static, have their own histories separate from the book itself. Gerrard Genette writes in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation that a “text is rarely presented in an unadorned state, unreinforced and unaccompanied by a certain number of verbal or other productions.”
Jugge and Parker may have believed that doctrine was verified through recourse to the text alone, but which text? No book is an island, and its shores are sandy and defuse out into the wider ocean of literature, so that paratext does “surround it and extend it,” as Genette notes, for “More than a boundary or a sealed border the paratext is, rather, a threshold.” Stated theology had it that all which was inviolate would be found in the distance between Genesis and Revelation, yet Jugge’s footnotes belied that quixotism with something altogether more utopian — all books must be, whether spoken or not, visible or not, apparent or not, in conversation at all times with a bevy of other works. Footnotes are the receipts of those dialogues. They are, as Chuck Zerby writes in The Devil’s Details: A History of Footnotes, “One of the earliest and most ingenious inventions of humankind… an indispensable tool of the scholar and a source of endlessly varied delight for the layperson.”[4]
Christians were in some ways Johnny-come-latelies to this method of freezing minds in contrast into the borders of the sacred page. While the footnote was a Protestant innovation, the process of standardizing commentary into a book has precursors in the Jewish Talmud. That massive collection is typographically organized with the primary text of the Mishna, constituting an assemblage of Jewish oral law, placed at the center of the page, which is then illuminated by rabbinical analysis known as Gemara. A tractate of the Talmud will display a portion of Mishnah with the Gemara, by several different authors, arrayed around the primary text. Gemara can be, at times, quite spirited, with Barry Scott Wimpfheimer writing in The Talmud: A Biography that the text “has the habit of citing its rabbinic authorities and tolerating disagreements.”
For example, in one Talmudic tractate where the Mishna is concerned with the prohibition on mixing milk with meat, a disagreement within the marginal gloss of the Gemara erupts as to whether fowl is properly considered meat, especially since poultry produce no dairy (and thus the moral imperative of the original commandment would seem irrelevant). Within the Mishna, Rabbi Akiva says that “Cooking the meat of… a bird in milk is not prohibited by Torah law,” (though he allows that it would be forbidden by the oral law). His interlocutor Rabbi Yosei HaGelili argues that a close conjunction of verses in Deuteronomy regarding the prohibition on eating a kid cooked in its mother’s milk, alongside a ban on ingesting carrion, “indicates that the meat of an animal that is subject to be prohibited due to the prohibition of eating an unslaughtered carcass is prohibited to cook in milk. Consequently, one might have thought it prohibited to cook in milk the meat of a bird.” The interpretive gloss of Gemera is a demonstration of a text’s living properties, the way in which correspondence, dialogue, and debate takes place even within the static environs of a book, and how any codex is an artifact of discussion that exists beyond the parameters of the page itself.
That footnotes are in some sense scholarly is central to our connotative sense of them. A book that is taken off the shelf at random advertises itself as academic if there are footnotes, endnotes, and bibliographical lists littering its pages. We see the footnote as a mark of erudition, as a means of demonstrating knowledge and giving attribution. The footnote is an exercise in due deference. It makes sense that alongside the categorization system of chapter and verse which structures early modern Bibles (and which was quickly adopted by Catholics), that the footnote was both a product of Protestantism and of modernity. Ministers might not have been priests, capable of enacting sacramental changes in our world, but they were like physicians, lawyers, and professors — which is to say bourgeoise professionals selling expertise. A minister can’t change water into wine, but what he’s selling is the explanation of how Hebrew conjugation and Greek declension necessitate the need to tithe. Footnotes are a mark of scholarly professionalism, and rhetorically they impart a heady ethos of demonstrating that the author appears to know what their talking about.
From one perspective, the footnotes in the Bishop’s Bible arguably marked a new method of composition, whereby a concern with evidence to bolster argumentation helped facilitate the transition from the Renaissance into the Enlightenment. The eighteenth-century, era of encyclopedists and lexicographers, was when the footnote became an academic mainstay; both a sop to the new empiricism whereby inductive arguments must be made by recourse to something outside the author’s reasoning, but also counterintuitively a pale ghost of the ancient reliance on past authorities. John Burrow explains in A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century that footnotes in the Enlightenment did ”far more than just identify sources… [they were] a way of bringing erudition to the support of the text without cluttering it with documents… an idiosyncratic art form, a commentary… [that] gives rein to a relaxed, garrulous intimacy which acts in counterpoint with the tautly controlled formality of the text.”
Perhaps the eighteenth-century’s greatest footnote-enthusiast is the historian Edward Gibbon in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, who uses the form to bitchily comment on antiquity’s greatest thinkers. Regarding the Church Father Origen’s self-castration, Gibbon notes that the goal was “to disarm the tempter;” when considering Saint Augustine, the historian says that his “learning is too often borrowing and… [his] arguments are too often his own.” [5] The role of footnotes, whether in the Talmud, the Bishop’s Bible, eighteenth-century historiography, or modern scholarship is to ostensibly provide source and evidence, but footnotes also provide a glimpse into a mind struggling and sometimes fighting with the material. “They evoke the community of historians, scholars and antiquaries, ancient and modern, in a kind of camaraderie of admiration, scorn and sometimes smut,” writes Burrow. Footnotes are a personal, individual, and estimably humane variety of typography.
Books are never self-contained, they are multileveled, contradictory things, and this is demonstrated best by that great engine of contradiction, the novel. When fully compelled, the novelistic imagination broaches no arbitrary unites, instead reveling in the multifaceted, and thus it’s a genre uniquely suited to mimetically presenting a mind in disagreement with itself. Novelists have thus made great stylistic use of the footnote as a means of demonstrating the simultaneous reverence and disagreement which the form is capable of enacting. Books as varied as James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves,[6] and of course David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest all make use of the footnote’s literary possibilities, allowing parallel narratives to take place in the margins, unseen narrators to comment, digressions, disagreements, and debates to occur within the white space of the page. The gold standard of the post-modern novel using footnotes to both bifurcate and further a narrative is Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a high modernist poem written by the character John Shade, with the footnoted annotations by the critic Charles Kinbote containing a narrative that ranges from campus bildungsroman to novel of international intrigue. It’s the sort of book where Shade can wax “For we die every day; oblivion thrives/Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,/And our best yesterdays are now foul piles/Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files,” while his biographer can note in the margins “This brand of paper… was not only digestible but delicious.”
An irony in that the reformers said that salvation was afforded through scripture alone, precisely at the same moment that they placed that book in a web of all of its mutual influences (and every other book as well). The Bible might be a thing-unto-itself, but its footnotes are an exhibition in how no book can survive without that almost mystical web of mutual interdependence with other books innumerable. “To the inexpert, footnotes look like deep root systems, solid and fixed,” writes Grafton, but to the “connoisseur, however, they reveal themselves as anthills, swarming with constructive and combative activity.” What makes a footnote remarkable, arguably, is that it provides evidence of that constructive and combative activity, since all studies, histories, monographs, novels, poems, and plays are born from a similar struggle between the author and reality, whether or not those scars are displayed. Since no book is written by an infant, or by a disembodied eternal consciousness, or from the pure and absolute ether of the void, then every book is the result of a writer reading other books. Footnotes are simply acknowledgement and demonstration of that, and every book written is threaded through with the spectral presence of footnotes, stated or unstated.
Image credit: Unsplash/Aaron Burden .
