Until a couple of centuries ago, nobody had yet invented them

It is one of those things that we give so however sitting that we may have never wondered: Why do books have chapters? The answer is, in reality, quite simple, and it has a lot to do with the way we have to tell stories and, above all, with a genuinely human aspiration, and whose origins date back to the beginning of time: make our lives easier.

Chapter 1. We must clarify that when we talk about chapters, we are doing it in the broader conception of the term: we talk rather to divide a text into successive and organized points. As we are organizing this article, without going any further: in epigraphs headed by a title that summarizes the content of each section, he adds or clarifies it. But this was not always common currency. Nicholas Dames, author of the Book

Scent. It is a legal tablet that dates back to the second century BC. According to Dames to An ABC podcastthe text had a “continuous law, but it was segmented and those segments had short titles.” That is, the first work of the chapters is to organize informative texts, to help the reader locate the information. This use began to spread, and thus we reached a parallel invention, the index: during part of ancient history, the most common support was the roll, sometimes it was accompanied by a list of chapters in a smaller scroll.

Separate things. Dames explains That this separation in epigraphs was unheard of: two thousand years ago there was no current conception of writing and, for example, the words that appeared in the rolls were not separated, there were no spaces between them. The authors did not care about those things, the editors were in charge of the texts in the texts when undertaking a task called “capitulation.” It was these editors, sometimes scholars of the time, sometimes medieval monks, who divided the works into chapters to make them more understandable.

The Bible, point and apart. What can attract attention, according to what countsIt is that the Bible was never divided into chapters, but that this action was carried out, in very different ways, between the fourth and thirteenth centuries. It was divided with innumerable ways, sometimes in long chapters, sometimes in short sections, which further confused the study and dissemination of a book that has already had a labyrinthine story. It was in the thirteenth century (or that is believed) when the one that would later be Archbishop of Canterbury, set the division into chapters that we know today. This division met critics as distinguished as the philosopher John Locke.

And things changed. The Bible was a definitive turning point: for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the novel became an absolutely massive entertainment format, the authors They thought their stories with the division by chapters In mind, with attention placed on the rhythm. Subsequent forms of diffusion, such as deliveries novels or, at present, television series are already meditated from very first stages of the conception of the story with the division of chapters in mind.

Header | Chapter VII of ‘Dracula’, Minotaur edition illustrated by Tomás son

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