THE first revival of the long slumbering trade in manuscripts took place in Italy, the cradle of the universities. Although after the breaking down of the old civilisation of the Western Empire, Italy had suffered more through invasions and devastations than any other country of Europe, it had nevertheless succeeded in preserving a certain continuity of cultivation and some remnants of learning or germs of intellectual life, from which germs there came again into growth an intellectual development for Europe. For the purposes of this study, I am concerned with the history of the early universities of Europe only in connection with their relations to the production of books. I propose, therefore, to give a brief description of the organisation and the character of the book-trade that came into existence in one or two of the representative university towns, with some reference to the general influence of the first universities upon the development and the distribution of literature. As has been indicated in the introductory chapter, it is my understanding that, with the beginning of the thirteenth century, the responsibility for the preservation and the development of the intellectual life of Europe, for the mental training of the increasing proportion of the community which was conscious of intellectual existence, and for the transmission to the existing generations of what had been preserved of the thought and learning of the past, was transferred from the monasteries and the ecclesiastical schools to the newly organised universities.