As the previous chapter showed, the margins were the go-to place if you had critical information to add to the text, for example if you were a student or a scholar. There is something else that is frequently found in the margin of medieval books: the footnote. As it became more common to add scholarly information in the margins, so too did the need increase to have logistics in place to deal with this extra information. An especially important challenge to overcome was to relate a marginal note directly to the words in the main text to which it pertained. While connecting main text and marginal comment—the essential function of the footnote—was an eleventh-century practice, as the previous chapter showed, in the thirteenth century, when universities were established all over Europe, the sign truly came into popular use. In this scholastic age the footnote also changed appearance in order to create a more efficient linkage system of text and marginal notation. This chapter deals with these changes while presenting a brief history of the footnote in the era before print.

Disconnected

The crux of our footnote system is the presence of a symbol that connects the note to the relevant location in the text. Curiously, in the Middle Ages it was quite common not to have such connections in place, especially, it seems, in the earlier centuries. When few remarks were added to the page, a reader could deduce with relative ease to which passage a marginal note referred. It helped in this respect if a text was widely read or known by heart, as many medieval works were. In such cases the note instantly made sense because the reader was already familiar with the referenced literary context. Moreover, as long as notes were few and short, a reader could simply insert them—interlineally—over the relevant word or passage. In Figure 31, for example, somebody wrote “beatus” (blessed) over the name Peter, compensating for an omission in the text (second column, line 14, near the green letter H).

In this system the position of the remark clearly identified the word to which it referred. However, as the number and size of such comments increased, it became impossible to place them between the lines. The great blank space provided by the margins was now drafted into service.