Background and Foreground
Getting Things in Context
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8395194 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David Knight (0000-0002-2096-3731, Durham University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1987 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 3-12 |
| Publication date | 1987-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The British Journal for the History of Science (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-0874 • E-ISSN: 1474-001X |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0007087400000455 |
| OpenAlex | W1992772419 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 12 |
Historians generally grumble at the liberties taken with letters and papers by editors and biographers in the past, while reviewers may complain at the professorial pomposities which interfere with the reader's interaction with the text. Certainly, reading is not a mere matter of information retrieval or of source-mining, but a meeting of minds, and any over-zealous editing which makes this more difficult will have failed. Editors, whether of journals or of documents, are midwives of ideas—self-effacingly bringing an author's meaning and style into the world. What reviewers praise is the unobtrusive, and what they damn is ‘a manner at once slapdash and intrusive’, making allowances perhaps for an ‘introduction which is as admirable as his footnotes are useless’. When in the 1960s new technology brought us a flood of facsimile reprints of scientific works, some avoided these problems by appearing naked and unashamed: but for a text on phrenology, or for Goethe's Theory of Colours , a fig leaf or two of commentary is really necessary to help the innocent reader to interact with the book. Facsimiles of nineteenth-century editions of Wilkins' papers, of some Newton correspondence, or of Henry More's poetry are even more problematic; the reader should know that these editors' assumptions cannot be taken for granted, and that their introductions are themselves historical documents. The exact reproduction of misprints and misbindings (giving pages out of order and misnumbered) is of dubious assistance to the modern reader
Art · Context (archaeology · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Meaning (existential · Order (exchange · Praise · Reading (process · Style (visual arts · Biographical and Historical Analysis · Computer Science · History · Philosophy
Faraday Rediscovered
From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry
The Light of Nature
Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature
Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment
Natural History in Depth
A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century
Common Denominators in Art and Science
Context, Image and Function
The Emergence of a Visual Language for Geological Science 1760-1840
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,13 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2018 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |