¹ Edwards, A.G.S. and Moffat, Douglas, “Annotation” in A Guide to Editing Middle English, ed. McCarren, Vincent P. and Moffat, Douglas (Ann Arbor, 1998), 217.Google Scholar

² Nibley, Hugh W., “The Last Days, Then and Now” in The Disciple as Scholar: Essays on Scripture and the Ancient World in Honor of Richard Lloyd Anderson, ed. Ricks, Stephen D., Parry, Donald W., and Hedges, Andrew H. (Provo, 2000), 269.Google Scholar It is probably no accident that this piece appeared in a festschrift, where the rules are often more relaxed.

³ Mikva, Abner J., “Goodbye to Footnotes,” University of Colorado Law Review 58 (1985), 648Google Scholar, just after describing footnotes as “a fungus.”

⁴ Melanie Phillips represents this view when she writes that “… Hoff Sommers is at her most impressive when she runs to earth not just the false evidence behind such claims, but the researchers who produced it and the reporters who credulously reproduced it.” Phillips, review of Sommers, Christina Hoff, The War Against Boys, Times Literary Supplement no. 5114 (6 April 2001), 9.Google Scholar

⁵ Herodotus ii. 123.7.

⁶ These aspects are discussed in the second part of this paper, to be published later.

⁷ Those before 1986 have been listed and assessed in Jones, Adam, Raw, Medium, Well Done: A Critical Review of Editorial and Quasi-Editorial Work on Pre-1885 European Sources for Sub-Saharan Africa, 1960-1986 (Madison, 1987).Google Scholar Given the high output of editorial work since 1986, an updated or supplemental edition of this is badly needed.

⁸ See below for more Barbot.

⁹ Published in ten installments in HA from 1974 to 1984.

¹⁰ The History of al-Tabari, XXVIII. The ʿAbbasid Recovery, trans. Fields, Philip M. and Lassner, Jacob (Albany, 1987).Google Scholar

¹¹ The History of al-Tabari, V. The Sasanids, the Byzantines, the Lakhmids, and Yemen, trans, and ed. Bosworth, C.E. (Albany, 1999)Google Scholar

¹² It seems not to be attributed to Lassner's lack of interest in historiographical matters; see his The Middle East Remembered: Forged Identities, Competing Narratives, Contested Spaces (Ann Arbor, 2000)Google Scholar, which, like Tabari's work, deals with early Islamic history.

¹³ The most successful collaboration aloing these lines that I know of is Dunn, Oliver and Kelley's, James E.The Diario of Christopher Columbus's First Voyage to America. 1492-1493 (Norman, 1988).Google Scholar

¹⁴ Hanna, Ralph III, Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts (Stanford, 1996), 260.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Davis, Henry E., An Examination of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters of Mr. Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1778). ii, with italics in original.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Gibbon, Edward, A Vindication of Some Passages in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1779), i–iiiGoogle Scholar, with italics in original.

¹⁷ Lynam, Edward, “The Present and the Future” in Richard Hakluyt and his Successors, ed. Lynam, Edward (London, 1946), 188.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Ibid., 261.

¹⁹ Keiser, George R., “Editing Scientific and Practical Writings” in A Guide to Editing Middle English, ed. McCarren, Vincent P. and Moffat, Douglas (Ann Arbor, 1998), 122.Google Scholar

²⁰ For a brief canvass of the ebb and flow of annotation in the publications of the Hakluyt Society since 1845, see Hair, P.E.H., “From Past to Future” in Compassing the Vaste Globe of the Earth, ed. Bridges, R.C. and Hair, P.E.H. (London, 1996), 20–32.Google Scholar Hair, a maximalist, put his principles into play in his and David Gamble's edition of Richard Jobson, where the annotation might run to as much as a third of the whole, as measured in words, and encompass discussions ranging from the historical to the botanical, the hydrographic to the linguistic. Jobson, Richard, The Discovery of the River Gambra (1623) ((London, 1999).Google Scholar In this way readers learn much about the area Jobson traversed, but which he did not know about and/or see fit to discuss.

²¹ Adam Jones notes (personal communication, 20 February 2001) that trimming on the advice of colleagues is seldom “a realistic option.”

²² (Madison, 1994)

²³ (Madison, 1997)

²⁴ Denham, Dixon, Clapperton, Hugh and Oudney, Walter, Narrative of Discoveries in Northern and Central Africa, in the Years 1822, 1823, and 1824 (London, 1826)Google Scholar; Clapperton, , Journal of a Second Expedition into the Interior of Africa (London, 1829)Google Scholar

²⁵ The first volume of which is Clapperton on Borno, ed. Lockhart, J.B. (Köln, 1996).Google Scholar A second volume, entitled Difficult and Dangerous Roads: Hugh's Clapperton's travels in Sahara and Fezzan, 1822-1825, co-edited with John Wright, is imminent.

²⁶ With apologies to others I've not mentioned, but whose work all African historians are bound to welcome.

²⁷ Awnsham, and Churchill, John, eds., A Collection of Travels and Voyages (6 vols.: London, 1732), volume 5Google Scholar

²⁸ Barbot, Jean, Barbot on Guinea: the Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa, 1678-1712, ed. Hair, P.E.H., Jones, Adam, and Law, Robin (2 vols.: London, 1992).Google Scholar Marion Johnson also contributed to the work.

²⁹ For which at least one reviewer would be grateful. Reviewing Barbot on Guinea in Cruising (Summer 1993), 36Google Scholar, a certain “IG” deplored the fact that the 1732 edition of Barbot had been “spoiled by scholarly interference. This he called “the original” and concluded that “[s]adly much of the omitted ‘plagiarised’ material is needed to complete the story.” My thanks to Adam Jones for providing me with a copy of this review.

³⁰ al-Saʿdi, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: Al-Saʿdi's al-sudan, Ta'rikhDown to 1613 and Other Contemporary Documents, ed. and trans. Hunwick, J.O. (Leiden, 1999).Google Scholar

³¹ Law, Robin, “Agaja's Letter to the King of England, 1726,” HA 29(2002).Google Scholar

³² This is the bane of world or global history.

³³ Mayer, Arno, Why did the Heavens Not Darken: the “Final Solution” in History (New York, 1988).Google Scholar

³⁴ Schmitt, Hans A. in Journal of Modern History 63 (1991), 821–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁵ Roth, John K., “Arno's Mayer's Holocaust Revisions,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 5 (1990), 217–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁶ Goldhagen, Daniel J., “False Witness,” New Republic (17 April 1989), 39–44.Google Scholar

³⁷ Browning, Christopher R., “The Holocaust Distorted,” Dissent 36 (1989), 397–400.Google Scholar

³⁸ Dawidowicz, Lucy S., “Perversions of the Holocaust,” Commentary 88 (October 1989), 57Google Scholar, citing only “a recent interview.”

³⁹ Kurzweil, Edith, “The Holocaust in the Academy,” Partisan Review 57 (199), 303.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ I have not tried to look at all the reviews, but a guess would be that the absence of footnotes serves as a lightning rod for those opposed to Mayer's views, while those who support his arguments were diplomatically silent.

⁴¹ Another recent work on the same subject, and one equally at odds with the weight of opinion, contains footnotes, but no bibliography and no index: Finkelstein, Norman G., The Holocaust Industry (New York, 2000).Google Scholar

⁴² Etienne Pasquier to Abel l'Angelier, 15 March 1594, in Pasquier, , Lettres familières, ed. Thicken, D. (Geneva, 1974), 244Google Scholar

⁴³ (Rotterdam, 1697)

⁴⁴ Sumption, Jonathan, The Hundred Years War: Trial by Battle (London, 1990), x.Google Scholar Sumption did not explain how readers would be convinced about arguments they were not even aware of.

⁴⁵ Sumption, Jonathan, The Hundred Years War: Trial by Fire (London, 1999), xii.Google Scholar See reviews in American Historical Review 99 (1994), 213CrossRefGoogle Scholar; English Historical Review 101(1991), 945–47Google Scholar; History 77 (1992), 285–86Google Scholar; History Today 41 (November 1991), 58–59Google Scholar; Speculum 69 (1994), 264–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁶ Hewsen, Robert H., “Artsrunid House of Sefedinian: Survival of a Princely Dynasty in Ecclesiastical Guise,” Journal of the Society of Armenian Studies 1 (1984), 124–28 passim, with all emphases added.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ It is possible though to think of exceptions on these very grounds. When Alfred Wegener published his first advocacy of continental drift, one reviewer wrote that “Wegener himself does not assist his reader to form an impartial judgment. Whatever his own attitude may have been originally, in his book he is not seeking truth; he is advocating a cause and is blind to every fact and argument that tells against it.” Lake, Philip, “Wegener's Displacement Theory,” Geological Magazine 59(1922), 338.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the other hand, Wegener, and those against whom he was arguing all knew that, at the time, he could not cite defenders—none existed—and did not need to cite opponents, which consisted of everyone else with a view on the matter.

⁴⁸ To cite another, more recent and more egregious, example: in arguing a case of much greater moment, that the ancient Holy Land actually lay in west-central Arabia, Salibi, Kamal, The Historicity of Biblical Israel: Studies in 1 & 2 Samuel (London, 1998), 193–279Google Scholar, fails to provide a single justifying reference, and only a very brief bibliography, to bolster his radical dissent. To cite just one other case, in a recent article in PMLA, the premier journal of its discipline, citation, even for quotes, is either shamefully absent or incoherently present. See Arias, Arturo, “Authoring Ethnicized Subjects: Rigoberta Menchú and the Performative Production of the Subaltern Self,” PMLA 116 (2001), 75–88.Google Scholar Presumably, readers are to decide for themselves just what the title means.

⁴⁹ A minor point: when a modern scholar uses a photographic reprint of an earlier work with identical pagination, it would be misleading to cite the date of the reprint, which might well be three hundred years or more later. Conversely, if the modern scholar cites a recent edition with different pagination, this must be made apparent, but so too should the fact that the work first appeared much earlier. Something along the lines of (London, 1978[1643]) would serve that purpose.

⁵⁰ (New York, 1999). A similar case, alarming for have been published by a university press, is Berlinerblau, Jacques, Heresy in the University: the Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals (New Brunswick, 1999), 197–242.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Loader, J.A., “review of W.W. Fields, Sodom and Gomorrah: History and Motif in Biblical Narrative,” Journal of Semitic Studies 45 (2000), 367.Google Scholar

⁵² Newson, Linda A., “The Population of the Amazon Basin in 1492: A View from the Ecuadorian Headwaters,” Transactions of the British Institute of Geographers 21 (1996), 5–26.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

⁵³ I have not tried to survey editorial guidelines in this respect. However, The Milbank Quarterly, dedicated to “issues in health and health care policy,” tells (www.milbank.org/guide.html) intending contributors that references “should be cited in the text by author's surname and year of publication, within parentheses, e.g., (Blake 1983),” with no mention of page numbers. I owe this reference to Bruce Fetter.

⁵⁴ The Chicago Manual of Style (14th ed.: Chicago, 1993), 493, with emphasis added.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Ibid., 505.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 502.

⁵⁷ Admittedly, they offer an ambitious apparatus of footnotes, embellished with many names and publications of repute. But when we look more closely at the parts of the book which seem to deploy serious historical argument, as opposed to surmise, the authors' grasp turns out to be uncertain.” Cameron, Averil, “Legend and Inscription,” TLS (17 November 2000), 28Google Scholar, reviewing Thiede, C.P. and d'Ancona, Matthew, The Quest for the True Cross (London, 2000).Google Scholar

⁵⁸ For instance, Smith, Marvin T., Coosa: the Rise and Fall of a Southeastern Mississippian Chiefdom (Gainesville, 2000), 82–95et passim.Google Scholar studiously ignores all the disagreement over the route of Hernàn de Soto's trek around the southeastern United States between 1539 and 1542

⁵⁹ Aung-Thwin, Michael, review of Vickery, Michael, “Economics and Politics in Pre-Angkor Cambodia,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 120 (2000), 456CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with bracketed material in original.

⁶⁰ Roberts, David, Great Exploration Hoaxes (New York: Modern Library, 2001), xxvi.Google Scholar Roberts did offer very brief chapter bibliographies in lieu of.

⁶¹ Morris, Edmund, Dutch: a Memoir of Ronald Reagan (New York, 1999).Google Scholar Another recent work using the same expedient is Hopkins, Keith, A World Full of Gods: Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Roman Empire (London, 2000)Google Scholar, for which see, e.g., Nemo, Hartmut [a pseudonym], “Letter to Keith Hopkins,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 4(2000), 219–24.Google Scholar

⁶² Sokal, Alan, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text 46/47 (Spring-Summer 1996), 217–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For the exposé see idem., “A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies,” Lingua Franca (May-June 1996), 62-64. For a collection including Sokal's original article, the exposé, the editors' responses, and a great deal of other commentary see The Sokal Hoax: the Sham that Shook the Academy, ed. Editors of Lingua Franca (Lincoln, 2000).Google Scholar

⁶³ Critics of Patrck Tierney's criticism of Yanomami ethnography (Darkness in El Dorado [New York, 2000Google Scholar] have in turn characterized his 1599 notes as camouflage, “mere adornments to enhance its credibility,” and “little more than textual display.” See “Perspectives on Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado,” Current Anthropology 42(2001), 271, 273, 274.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ (New York, 1973).

⁶⁵ Palmeri, Frank, “The Satiric Footnotes of Swift and Gibbon” in Critical Essays on Jonathan Swift, ed. Palmeri, Frank (New York, 1993), 187–203.Google Scholar

⁶⁶ Moore, C.C., A Lecture Introductory to the Course of Hebrew Instruction in the General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States (New York, 1825), 6–7.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ [Froude, J.A.], “England's Forgotten Worthies,” Westminster Review [American edition] 58 (1852), 18–21.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ Beehler, Rodger, “In Editing a Good Novel, the Best Footnote Is⁰,” Chronicle of Higher Education (9 March 2001), B14–B15.Google Scholar

⁶⁹ Edwards, /Moffat, , “Annotation,” 217Google Scholar

⁷⁰ Sokal, Alan, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text 46/47 (Spring-Summer 1996), 217–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Sokal's title is twice as long than any others in this number.

⁷¹ Fish, Stanley, “Professor Sokal's Bad Joke” in The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy (Lincoln, 2000), 84.Google Scholar The piece first appeared in the New York Times (21 May 1996).