On Bayle’s Footnotes

“‘Once the historian writes with footnotes, historical narrative becomes a distinctly modern’ practice, Grafton explains. History is no longer a matter of rumor, unsubstantiated opinion, or whim. ‘The text persuades, the note proves,’ he avers. Footnotes do double duty, for they also ‘persuade as well as prove’ and open up the work to a multitude of voices... Pierre Bayle’s enormously influential Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697) is the thing to cite here. The Dictionary ‘consisted in large part of footnotes (and even footnotes to footnotes).’ Within a few decades scholars emulating Bayle ‘were producing footnotes by the bushel—and satirists were making fun of them for doing so.’”

Matthew Wills, “History’s Footnotes,” https://daily.jstor.org/historys-footnotes/. One of the key contrasts between the scientific and enlightenment interest in evidence and recent web design and AI models, is a lack of provenance, which I noted here. Bayle’s work is one of the key points at which the concept of critique enters the English language. He was a Huguenot refugee, another French word that arrived around this time.