Footnote
The footnote is the scholarly device that anchors a claim in a written narrative to its supporting source. Anthony Grafton's history argues it is the form through which modern historical scholarship became auditable.
A footnote is a marginal or bottom-of-page note that supplies a citation, qualification, or aside attached to a specific claim in the main text. Its modern scholarly form — small superscript number, matching note containing source details — became the conventional way historians, philologists, and other researchers support assertions without interrupting the narrative line. Anthony Grafton's book *The Footnote: A Curious History* (1997) traces how the form emerged from early modern erudition and argues that the footnote, far from being a clerical detail, is the device through which historical scholarship became auditable: it lets a reader centuries later check what evidence a claim rested on and whether the historian read the source correctly. Grafton presents the footnote as the formal proof structure of historical argument, the mechanism that separates documented history from pure narrative. The same logic carries into modern academic writing, into legal briefs (with their citations to precedent), and into the hyperlinked reference lists of online encyclopedias.