Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

Summary

Perhaps it is the inevitable fate of any convention, but literary history does not, it turns out, have many examples of people appreciating great chaptering. In The History of English Prose Rhythm (1912) – one of the sources for James Joyce’s virtuosic-or-unreadable parodies of the evolution of English prose in Ulysses – George Saintsbury remarks on Thomas Malory’s decision to insert a chapter break at a decisive moment in his fifteenth-century Morte d’Arthur. At the end of chapter ten of the Morte, Lancelot rides into a castle, having slayed its gatekeeper, only to hear from the castle’s residents ‘in doors and windows that said “Fair Knight: thou art unhappy.”’ Saintsbury praises Malory’s sense of timing here. The chapter break introduces a pause, leaving those words, as Dames puts it, ‘hovering in the air’. The next chapter begins with Lancelot successfully freeing captives from the prison; as such, the chapter has served to elongate the narrative incident and heighten the tension.The only problem is that this was not Malory’s division, but rather one added by the printer William Caxton (c.1422-92). This fact was only discovered in 1934 when an edition of the Morte predating Caxton was discovered at Winchester College. As it turns out, the Winchester version had no chapters. The modulations of time are the work of Caxton’s specific ‘remediation’. He creates an ‘artful segmentation, a resonant silence, in the printed volume’s visual patterning’. Caxton is paired in this chapter of The Chapter with the anonymous fifteenth-century remediators who transformed Chrétien de Troyes’s great twelfth-century Arthurian verse into prose. Unlike Caxton’s their results are not acclaimed; like the authors of movie novelisations today, they are vulgarisers, profaning the sacred bonds between form and content. In their hands, Chrétien’s flowing verse – praised in Mimesis by Auerbach as ‘light and almost easy’ – is not only segmented with red ink, but also crowded with insistent ex...