I have been working on the discovery of alternative scriptures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the process, I have learned a lot more than I ever knew about ancient movements like the Gnostics, but some of my interesting “finds” have actually been about the era that was doing the discovery, and what we would consider the very different ways in which academics recorded and presented information. To put it simply, the Victorian scholarly book was a very different object from anything we might recognize today, and you might even need a user’s guide to get the best value out of any example that you might ever need for your research. Here is that guide. You’re welcome.With marvelous examples from Lightfoot's commentary on Colossians and Philemon.[...]
I wonder if in the Victorian era the pace of scholarship was slow enough that Lightfoot and his contemporaries just assumed scholars could read everything that was written. Or maybe they just wrote for themselves and it was their readers' problem to find what to take away.
Scholars do still produce turbo footnotes, if not as many as in the old days. But no one assumes that specialists read everything, and much current scholarship is scarcely read at all.
I think this AB post still counts, in a footnotey way, as a continuation of Professor Jenkins's Lost and Found Scriptues series. For earlier posts, see here and links.
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