According to the passage, the property of the codex that mattered most to reading was

that it could be written on both sides of the leaf.

that it cost less to produce than a roll of the same length.

that a passage could be reached directly and thereafter named.

that it withstood repeated handling better than a roll.

The distribution of the earliest surviving Christian manuscripts is introduced as

proof that the codex was cheaper for religious communities than for literary ones.

evidence linking the adoption of the form to a particular way of reading.

an anomaly for which the passage offers no explanation.

the reason pagan literary texts were slow to give up the roll.

The mention of Jewish and Greek commentators is meant to establish that

comparison across separate texts was practised before the codex existed.

the roll was better suited to scholarly work than has generally been supposed.

the codex was taken up by scholars earlier than by other readers.

commentary is an older form of writing than the texts it comments on.

The author's caution in the final paragraph is directed against the view that

the codex lowered the cost of a practice that already existed.

concordances and indexes depend on a book that can be cited by a fixed address.

a roll had to be wound to bring a given passage into view.

the codex brought into being the desire to read one text against another.

The passage's closing generalization implies that a technology which makes a difficult operation cheap should be expected to produce

an activity that no one had previously attempted.

a wider population performing an activity that specialists already performed.

a period in which the displaced technology is defended by those who used it.

a decline in the skill with which the activity is carried out.

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What the Codex Made Cheaper

PRACTICE

100:00+4 −1MCQ Single Answer

Reading Passage

For most of antiquity the standard form of the book around the Mediterranean was the roll, a long strip of papyrus wound between two rods and read by unwinding it with one hand while winding with the other. Between the second and the fourth centuries it was displaced, almost completely, by the codex: leaves folded and bound along one edge, which is the form a book still takes. The advantages usually listed are material ones. A codex is written on both sides of the leaf and so holds more for the same outlay; it survives handling better; it travels more easily. But the property that mattered most to reading is one the list tends to omit. A roll must be wound to the place you want. A codex opens at it. And because a location in a codex stays put, it can be given a name — a page number, and later still a chapter and a verse. Consider what that permits. A reader can hold a finger in one place and turn to another, comparing two passages that lie a long way apart. The concordance, the index and the dense apparatus of cross-references in the margin all assume a book that can be entered at any point and cited by a fixed address; none of them is workable on a roll. It is suggestive, then, that the earliest surviving Christian manuscripts are overwhelmingly codices at a period when pagan literary texts are still overwhelmingly rolls. The most plausible explanation on offer is a habit of reading: a community whose central practice was to set text against text, reading prophecy beside what it was taken to fulfil, had more use than most for a book that opened where it was asked to. The temptation at this point is to say that the form produced the practice, and the sequence will not support it. The codex did not create the wish to read one text against another. Jewish and Greek commentators had been doing exactly that on rolls for centuries, laboriously, with assistants and multiple copies and a great deal of winding. What changed was the price. An operation that had been the preserve of specialists with time and resources became something an ordinary reader could perform alone in an afternoon. Technologies of this kind rarely invent a use. They lower the cost of one that already existed and was rationed by its difficulty, and the visible consequence — a sudden proliferation of concordances and cross-references — records the arrival of a new class of user rather than of a new activity.

The primary purpose of the passage is to