Just as kaput stood for a section or a paragraph, so its diminutive capitulum, or ‘little head’, denoted a chapter. The general Roman preference for the letter ‘C’ had all but seen off the older Etruscan ‘K’ by 300 BC,15 but ‘K’ for kaput persisted some time longer in written documents. By the 12th century, though, ‘C’ for capitulum had overtaken ‘K’ in this capacity as well.16 The use of capitulum in the sense of a chapter of a written work was so closely identified with ecclesiastical documents that it came to be used in church terminology in a bewildering number of ways: monks went ad capitulum, ‘to the chapter (meeting)’, to hear a chapter from the book of their religious orders, or ‘chapter-book’, read out in the ‘chapter room’.17
Monastic scriptoria worked on the same principle as factory production lines, with each stage of book production delegated to a specialist. A scribe would copy out the body of the text, leaving spaces for a ‘rubricator’ to later embellish the text by adding versals (large, elaborate initial letters), headings and other section marks as required. Taken from the Latin rubrico, ‘to color red’, rubricators often worked in contrasting red ink, which not only added a decorative flourish but also guided the eye to important divisions in the text.18 In the hands of the rubricators, ‘C’ for capitulum came to be accessorized by a vertical bar, as were other litterae notabiliores [notable letters: “enlarged letter within a text, designed to clarify the syntax of a passage”] in the fashion of the time; later, the resultant bowl was filled in and so ‘¢’ for capitulum became the familiar reversed-P of the pilcrow.16
As the capitulum’s appearance changed, so too did its usage. At first used only to mark chapters, it started to pepper texts as a paragraph or even sentence marker so that it broke up a block of running text into meaningful sections as the writer saw fit. ¶ This style of usage yielded very compact text,19 harking back, perhaps, to the still-recent practice of scriptio continua [un-punctuated spaceless writing]. Ultimately, though, the concept of the paragraph overrode the need for efficiency and became so important as to warrant a new line—prefixed with a pilcrow, of course, to introduce it.20