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assumed to be gentleman-scholars like hirn-men who had not read as deeply or
widely as he had, perhaps, but not historical ~~ecialists.'~ Ranke is not in quite
the same position, though his notes look much the same. By 1839, within a
German scholarly tradition then over fifty years old, Ranke's audience was
divided. He did have lay readers, who could read his detailed narrative of the
sixteenth century for the important cultural history it was without consulting or
judging his use of sources, but he was also writing for other specialist
historians-some of them his enemies-who could and would scan his footnotes
closely for evidence of what he had found and what he had missed. For the
former audience, detailed publication information about nonarchival materials in
citation notes was not needed; for the latter audience, it was redundant. Ranke
does not have to give a complete reference citation to Milman's History of Latin
Christianity because there was only one edition of it; his audience either would
not seek it out or probably already owned it.
But Ranke had to consider such issues, as do we." It is this gradual
professionalization of German scholarship, with its competitive and even
agonistic edge, that would drive the forms and methods of citation systems
henceforward, especially in the developing American academic world. When
American scholars returned from German universities in the nineteenth century
to establish the American university system of graduate research institutions
superadded to undergraduate colleges, they brought with them the German
attitude toward citation rather than the English. This loyalty to scholarly
precision met the more indigenous English-based attitude of gentleman-
amateurism in writing from sources, and the resulting mixture of attitudes took
more than a century to sort out. Should sourced writing conceive of a popular or
a speciallearning"?