The history of books in manuscript and of the production and distribution of literature in Europe from the beginning of the work of S. Benedict to the time when the printing-press of Gutenberg revolutionised the methods of book-making, a period covering about nine centuries, may be divided into three stages. During the first, the responsibility for the preservation of the old-time literature and for keeping alive some continuity of intellectual life, rested solely with the monasteries, and the work of multiplying and of distributing such books as had survived was carried on by the monks, and by them only. During the second stage, the older universities, the organisation of which had gradually been developed from schools (themselves chiefly of monastic origin), became centres of intellectual activity and shared with the monasteries the work of producing books. The books emanating from the university scribes were, however, for the most part restricted to a few special classes, classes which had, as a rule, not been produced in the monasteries, and, as will be noted in a later chapter, the university booksellers (_stationarii_ or _librarii_) were in the earlier periods not permitted to engage in any general distribution of books. With the third stage of manuscript literature, book-producing and bookselling machinery came into existence in the towns, and the knowledge of reading being no longer confined to the _cleric_ or the _magister_, books were prepared for the use of the larger circles of the community, and to meet the requirements of such circles were, to an extent increasing with each generation, written in the tongue of the people. The first period begins with the foundation by S. Benedict, in 529, of the monastery of Monte Cassino, and by Cassiodorus, in 531, of that of Vivaria or Viviers, and continues until the last decade of the twelfth century, when we find the earliest record of an organised book-business in the universities of Bologna and Paris. The beginning of literary work in the universities, to which I refer as indicating a second stage, did not, however, bring to an end, and, in fact, for a time hardly lessened, the production of books in the monasteries.