Chapter divisions in Pliny the Elder

I’ve returned to looking at Diana Albino’s article on ancient chapter divisions and summaries, and I was rereading my translation of a long chunk here.

One bit caught my eye, about the use of the diple, coronis and paragraphos marks:

Already in the papyri, in fact, the various parts are often separated from each other by intervals of spacing, or through the device of protruding into the margin the first letter of the initial line of each section, or by means of special signs to indicate diplh~, korwni/j and paragra/foj. … These ways of subdivision are also preserved in the Middle Ages. Thus, in codex M (end of the 5th century, beginning of the 6th) of the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder, the chapters are marked by empty intervals or capital letters or even the sign of coronis (8).

(8) Cfr. K. DZIATZKO: Untersuchungen ueber ausgewahlte Kapitel des antiken Buchwesens, Leipzig, 1900, p. 53 and pp. 113-114; PLINII Naturalis Historia ed. SILLING, Gothae 1855 voI. VI, Proleg. pp. 18, 20, 26.

Dziatzko’s book is online at Google books here.  P.53 merely gives a general description of the manuscript ‘M’ of Pliny’s Natural History, which is a palimpsest of the Stiftes St. Paul in Kämthen Kärnten, numbered III (formerly LXXXVII), written in majuscule around the start of the 6th century.  It contains most of books 11-15.  It was first used by F. Mone for vol. 6 of his edition (Gotha, 1855; hence ‘M’).

The material in question is on p.114, and discusses the sections arising from the content, which are delimited by larger letters and gaps in the text.  The divisions, especially in the latter part of the manuscript, are marked by a new line and a disengaged letter in the margin.  But in some cases there is a large letter in the margin, for no obvious reason.  Dziatzko speculates that this is the remains of a paragraphos signalled in the ancestor copy.

Footnote 1 adds:

Hier wie sonst noch öfter steht am Ende der vorausgehenden, nicht vollen Zeile, überdies die Koronis. — Uebrigens sind, was nicht zu verwundem ist, manche Abschnitte an Stellen angesetzt, die man anders und auch besser auswählen könnte.

Here, as elsewhere more often, we find the Koronis, at the end of the previous line, not the whole line, moreover. – By the way, unsurprisingly, some divisions are in places where different and better ones could have been chosen.

I could see no mention in all this, however, of numerals in the margin, indicating that the sections were numbered and perhaps connected with the author’s table of contents in book 1.

The book is an interesting one, tho, and deserves to be better known.  I only wish my German was better!

UPDATE: I was wondering where “Kämthen” might be.  A google search leaves me still in the dark.  Might it be “Kempten” in Bavaria?  But if so, where is this St. Paul monastery? 

UPDATE2: But it turns out — thanks to JS in the comments — that I simply had an OCR error, and it is really Kärnthen, or Kärnten as it is today!