September 16, 2021

Facebook post, 9/16/2011:

Just read that the longest footnote ever written was in excess of 150 pages [sic], and appeared in a 19th-century history of Northumberland in England. Now if that doesn't sound like what my sister would call a "page turner," I don't know what does.

 

Comment:

When I was a practicing scholar, I had the sense that the Victorian-era drive to document stemmed from a widespread cultural anxiety about the baseline coherence of the universe we live in—more precisely, the sense that with the waning influence of the Christian faith, it fell to humanity, and specifically educated, affluent white humanity, to in effect hold the universe together. It was the White Man's Burden, to cite Rudyard Kipling's notorious poem, to try to rule and know everything. Safe to say a 150-page footnote about the northeast English county of Northumberland was an hysterical manifestation of that anxiety. Safe to say also that in the age of multiculturalism and Trumpian alt-reality, that hubristic hope is very much a thing of the past—and good riddance.