The Saunterer has discovered that a considerable minority of those who have cited his research articles and books have gotten it wrong. They cited something he wrote as supporting something they wrote, but it didn’t. This is by way of noting that scholarship in general often rests on stretched citations, a claim that Anthony Grafton illustrates in his book, The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard University Press.1997). From page 235:
Footnotes guarantee nothing, in themselves. The enemies of truth - and truth has enemies - can use them to deny the same facts that honest historians use them to assert. The enemies of ideas - and they have enemies as well - can use them to amass citations and quotations of no interest to any reader, or to attack anything that resembles a new thesis. Yet footnotes form an indispensable if messy part of that indispensable, messy mixture of art and science: modern history.
For a brief biography of Anthony Grafton, click here.
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