Approaching Public Sector “Value Education” Publications

Abstract

In introducing his The Footnote: A Curious History (1997), Anthony Grafton made the following observation:

Once the historian writes with footnotes, historical narrative tells a distinctively modern, double story. Traditional political historians, in the ancient world and in the Renaissance, wrote from within a rhetorical tradition, as statesmen or generals addressing their peers. The histories they produced reflected far more interest in virtue and vice than in sources and dating. Their works claimed universal validity; they eloquently described examples of good and evil, prudent and imprudent speech and action, that would provide moral and political lessons valid in all times and places. Modern historians, by contrast, make clear the limitations of their own theses even as they try to back them up. The footnotes form a secondary story, which moves with but differs sharply from the primary one. In documenting the thought and research that underpin the narrative above them, footnotes prove that it is a historically contingent product, dependent on forms of research, opportunities and states of particular questions that existed when the historian went to work. (p.23)

The distinction between two kinds of scholarly discourse noted here is central to the argument of and to the area of textual circulation addressed in this chapter (I outline the area very soon).