The chapter says something like: The characters may not have known it, but something had ended, and something else was about to begin. Illustration by Sophia Foster-Dimino

On a late May morning in 735 in the Northumbrian monastery known as Jarrow, England’s preëminent historian and scriptural scholar lay dying while still hard at work. As a famous letter written by his disciple Cuthbert tells it, the Venerable Bede lay surrounded by colleagues, who took their leave in order to attend the morning’s Ascension Day service. One, however, remained by his side, a young scribe known as Wilbert. Death was clearly drawing close; anxious that Bede’s work—an Anglo-Saxon translation of the Gospel of John—be completed yet apologetic for his insistence, Wilbert reminded Bede that “one chapter still remained.” Cuthbert tells us that Bede proclaimed himself willing and dictated the remaining chapter to Wilbert; after the final sentence was written down, Bede breathed his last, saying, “It is finished.”

The Latin word Wilbert used to prod his master to completion—capitulum—would eventually feed into a series of European languages: the Spanish capítulo, the French chapitre, the Czech kapitola, the German Kapitel, the Romanian capitol, the Italian capitolo, and the English “chapter.” For readers, the word, and the thing it describes, is inescapable. And yet few people notice it. Books have been written or arranged in chapters for over two millennia now, although that fact has never received the attention it deserves from historians of the written word. Perhaps the sheer longevity of the concept has rendered it invisible. It would not have been invisible in eighth-century Jarrow, however; Bede worked in the most important scriptorium of his era, where no small amount of scholarly labor was devoted to producing capitula—essentially, divisions of scriptural texts with headings or summaries. Bede himself produced several such works. The chapter was a tool of analysis and memory for Bede and his colleagues. Perhaps it has never ceased being so; we simply expect chapters to be there, breaking up our reading, giving us the permission to pause or stop. Prose writers work in chapters with far less self-awareness than poets work in stanzas or composers in movements. In the great novel of writer’s block, “New Grub Street,” from 1891, George Gissing perfectly evokes the routine quality of the chapter with a description of his despairing protagonist sitting down to work: “At the head of the paper was inscribed ‘Chapter III,’ but that was all.”

Inevitability does not, however, imply meaninglessness. The chapter is tied intimately to our notions of literacy, as signalled by the fact that we give the name “chapter books” to the texts that offer school-age children their first mature reading experiences. More than this, the chapter has become a way of looking at the world, a way of dividing time and, therefore, of dividing experience. Its origins date back to long before the printing press or even the bound codex, back to the emergence of prose in antiquity as both an expressive and an informational medium. Literary evolution rarely seems slower than it does in the case of the chapter. What does the chapter’s beginnings reveal about the way our books and stories are still put together?

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The first authors who wrote in chapters were not storytellers. They were compilers of knowledge, either utilitarian or speculative, who used chapters as a way of organizing large miscellanies. Cato the Elder’s “De Agri Cultura” (“On Farming”), from the second century B.C.E., was organized in numbered units with titles; Pliny the Elder’s great compilation of Roman science, “Naturalis Historia” (“Natural History”), from the first century C.E., came with a summarium of topics similar to a modern table of contents; Aulus Gellius, a collector of legal and linguistic arcana in the second century C.E., divided his “Noctes Atticae” (“Attic Nights”) into “capita” with long descriptive titles.* These chapters, unlike the “books” of epic poetry, were what we would now call finding aids: devices for quickly locating specific material in long texts that were not meant to be read straight through.

The authors of such miscellanies were forward-thinking in their sense that some texts are consulted more than they are read; they envisioned a focussed, interested, but not immersed reader, dipping into their books by locating relevant passages. Organizing those passages often became the task of editors as much as of writers. Christian literary culture took strongly to this form of intellectual labor; at centers of book production like Caesarea, the chapter was both an intellectual tool and a style. Figures like Eusebius produced carefully segmented texts such as his “Ecclesiastical History,” and they often turned their attention to the segmenting and labelling of older texts. The chapter might have disappeared in favor of some other form had not the early Fathers of the Church made it their signature technique. Jerome, in fact, seems to have been the first to unambiguously use the term capitulum to refer to a numbered, titled segment of a text.

In their enthusiasm for chapters, however, early Christian editors and writers introduced a problem, one that cut to the heart of their own sacred texts and presaged the challenge that chapters present to writers even today. How do you segment continuous, narrative texts rather than informational ones? How, for instance, do you divide Scripture—like the Gospels—into bits, given that they were written as one continuous text, undivided and unlabelled? At first, the problem must have seemed merely technical. Eusebius solved it by devising an elaborate system of small sections cross-indexed among the different Gospels, one that remained popular well into the Middle Ages, but it was cumbersome: there were over three hundred such sections in Matthew and Luke each. The Bibles of late antiquity and early medieval culture contained a bewildering variety of chaptering systems to complement or replace Eusebius’s sections, and each system had its own sense of what counts as a significant unit of action or a significant moment deserving of its own heading. To divide, it turns out, is already to interpret.

This left Christian Europe without a standard system of reference for its central texts. It was not until the advent of the university that a solution was first found—or, at least, first promulgated—in the new university of Paris in the early decades of the thirteenth century. Here we enter the realm of scholarly legend. The story, which dates back to the fifteenth century, and which some consider apocryphal, goes as follows: A young English member of the theological faculty, Stephen Langton, was baffled in his lectures by the many different chapter systems in his students’ Bibles. (A contemporary teacher of literature, facing students who have multiple paperback and electronic editions of the assigned books, knows this difficulty well.) Langton set out to forge a simpler and more elegant chaptering of the Bible, one with fewer divisions of a more consistent size—but that might nonetheless be keyed to significant transitions in the text. By having the industrious Parisian university copyists produce his version, Langton could insure that its adoption would be as quick and as universal as possible. This approach worked—the biblical chapters devised in Paris in the first two decades of the thirteenth century are the ones we still use today.

The Langton chapters, if we can call them that, gave the Bible a particular narrative style. By trying to produce chapters of roughly equivalent lengths, Langton had to unmoor himself from a traditional understanding of scenic units. Events in texts like the Gospels do not come in equal lengths: some miracles take a sentence or two, while the Passion narrative unfolds at a much more expansive pace. Langton was flexible—he had to be, given his task—but he seems to have settled on a framework centered upon two basic ideas: time and place.