Footnoted

Aaron Barlow's post on the "footnote fallacy" reminds me that this fallacy has been of remarkably longstanding duration.  One of the simultaneous fascinations and frustrations of working on nineteenth-century religious controversial literature, especially of the more low-rent variety, is how authors deploy their footnotes.  (Bear in mind that Victorian footnotes frequently lead to tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth: you get authors with no titles, titles with no authors, an author's last name with no other identifying information...) On the American side of the pond, for example, Julia M'Nair Wright annotates Secrets of the Convent and Confessional (1872/73) with references to Catholic authors whom she may or may not actually have read (e.g., St. Alphonsus Liguori, Peter Dens, Bellarmine, Gregory XIII), right alongside the popular anti-Catholic authors of the day (e.g., William Hogan, Charles Chiniquy, Rebecca Reed).  Wright misspells names, sometimes does and sometimes does not include page references or even titles, and only occasionally notes when her acquaintance with a primary text derives from a secondary source.  The appendix at the end includes excerpts from a number of contemporary anti-Catholic articles, many of which are sourced to periodicals only by title (no dates, no page numbers, sometimes no authors).   Back in the UK, Charlotte Anley's anti-Tractarian novel Earlswood (1853) footnotes well-known authors such as Newman and Pusey, as well as various and sundry Tracts for the Times.   

In both cases, the footnotes are supposed to "prove" that the fictional character is merely a ventriloquist, voicing "real" theological positions held by the author's opponent.  As is frequently the case with other novels of this type, the novelists construct a singular theological adversary out of multiple and sometimes wildly (even comically) divergent authors.  Wright, for example, makes no attempt to distinguish between medieval and modern Catholic theologians, or between Jesuits and members of other religious orders.  Similarly, Anley shows little awareness that the Tractarians did not, in fact, always speak as a group.  Moreover, the footnotes form a kind of textual collage: the novelists cherrypick positions A, B, and C from texts D, E, and F, assign them to a particular character in the midst of a particular argument, and neglect the original contexts altogether.  And novelists (and other controversial writers) frequently set the bar for "truth" quite low: authors on the "right" side are automatically trusted, even if they've been discredited, whereas authors on the "wrong" side are automatically distrusted (unless they speak against themselves, in which case they suddenly become truthful).