Among the monastery printing-presses were those of the Carthusian monastery in Strasburg, the monastery of S. Ulrich and Afra, in Augsburg, and the Benedictine monasteries in Nuremberg and Rostock. As a rule, in places where the work of scribes had been active, the printing-press found a ready acceptance. It was not long, however, before so great a development in the methods of the printing business was brought about that it became difficult for the monasteries to carry on the work effectively, and by the middle of the sixteenth century the production of books in monasteries had practically ceased. The favourable relations between the Church and the printers were checked by the Humanistic movement, which, a generation or more before the Reformation, began to bring into question the authority of the Church and the infallibility of papacy. The influence of the Humanistic teachers was so largely furthered by the co-operation of the printers that the jealousy and dread of the ecclesiastical authorities were promptly aroused, and they began to utter fulminations against the wicked and ignorant men who were using the art of printing for misleading the community and for the circulation of error. The ecclesiastics, who had at first favoured the widest possible circulation of the Scriptures, now contended that much of the heretical teaching was due to the misunderstanding of the Scriptures on the part of readers who were acting without the guidance of their spiritual advisers. The authorities of the Church now began to take the ground that the reading of the Scriptures by individuals was not to be permitted, and that the Bible was to be given to the community only through the interpretation of the Church. At the same time, the authority of the Church was exerted to repress, or at least to restrict, the operations of the printing-press, and to bring printers and publishers under a close ecclesiastical supervision and censorship. It was now, however, too late to stand between the printing-press and the people. Large portions of the community had become accustomed to a wide circulation of books and to the selection without restriction of such reading-matter as might be placed within their reach, and this privilege they were no longer willing to forego. It was nevertheless true that in certain countries, particularly in Italy and in France, the censorship of the Church was strong enough seriously to hamper and interfere with publishing undertakings and to check the natural development of literary production. Even in Italy, however, the critical spirit was found to be too strong to be entirely crushed out, and from Venice, the most important of the Italian publishing centres, it proved possible to secure for the productions of the printing-press a circulation that was practically independent of the censorship of Rome.