This year of 1492 appears to have been one of exceptional intellectual as well as physical activity. It records not merely the completion of a number of important works marking the close of the manuscript period of literary production, but the publication, as will be noted in a later chapter, of a long series of the more important of the earlier printed books in Mayence, Basel, Venice, Milan, and Paris. In Belgium, through the first half of the fifteenth century, while many of the monasteries had fallen into a condition of luxurious inactivity, work was still carried on in the Laurentium monastery of Liége by Johann of Stavelot, and by other zealous scribes, and in several other of the Benedictine monasteries of the Low Countries the _scriptoria_ were kept busied. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, and for some years after the beginning of the work of the German printers, the production of manuscripts in Germany continued actively in the monastery of S. Peter at Erfurt, and in the monasteries of S. Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg, the work of which has been recorded with full precision and detail in the famous catalogue of Wilhelm Wittwer. In 1472, in this latter monastery, Abbot Melchior founded the first printing-office at Augsburg in order to give to the monks continued employment, and in order also to be able to enlarge the library by producing copies of books for exchange. It was a long time, however, before the work of the printing-press came to be sufficiently understood to bring to a stop the labours of the scribes in manifolding manuscripts for sale and for exchange. The writings of the nun Helena of Hroswitha, the _Chronicle of Urspergense_, and other works continued to be prepared in manuscript form after printed editions were in the market. The same was the case with the great choir books, which continued during nearly half the century to be very largely prepared by hand in the _scriptoria_. This persistence of the old methods was partly due to habit and to the difficulty of communication with the centres in which the printing-presses were already at work, but was very largely, of course, the result of the fact that in the monasteries was always available a large amount of labour, and that the use of this labour for the preparation of sacred books had come to form part of the religious routine of the institution.