A great literary event, though only indirectly connected with the history of the monastic orders, nevertheless enables us to form an accurate judgment as to the intellectual character of the religious houses during the last thirty-five years of the fifteenth century, and the first years of the sixteenth: we refer to the invention of printing. Whatever may have been the causes that induced these houses to encourage the extension of printing, the action of each community is made manifest by its achievements in that vast laboratory which typographical art had founded, in the stead of a few cells and studies where the human hand had been wearily transcribing manuscript after manuscript. In an obscure monastery at Subiaco, near Rome, two printers from Mayence, Sweynheym and Pannartz, guests of the monks, published the first edition of Lactantius, followed by several other valuable works of ecclesiastical authors (1465–1467); in the monastery of St. Eusebius, within the walls of Rome, George Laver, of Würzburg, printed many publications, about 1470. Several clerks brought up in the episcopal schools of Metz, Liége, Mayence, and Tuscany--Adam Rot, Paul Leenen, Ulric Zell, and Jacob Caroli--superintended in person printing-offices at Rome, Cologne, and Florence, which were worthy rivals of those which were being established in every direction by ordinary traders. Colard Mansion, a clerk belonging to a community at Bruges, who was specially entrusted with the copying of manuscripts (1414–1473) conceived the idea of substituting for the tedious process of the pen and the engraving pencil the rapidity of movable types and screw printing-presses. The Brethren of the Common Life, his colleagues, who were settled at Rhingau, near Mayence, at Val St. Marie, Nuremberg, at Cologne, and at Rostock, imitated the example of Colard Mansion, and from mere calligraphists became master-printers (1474–1479). Two theological doctors of the Sorbonne, William Fichet and Jehan de la Pierre, also induced three skilful German workmen, Ulric Gering, Martin Crantz, and Michael Friburger, to come to Paris, where they provided them with a place to set up their presses and to establish a workshop (1470). This was the origin of printing in Paris. Two years later, William Caxton obtained leave to print in England, beneath the roof of Westminster Abbey; while in Switzerland, a canon of Munster (in Argovia), Hélias Hélye (1472, 1473), had some small presses at work. Soon after this, the Dominicans, the Carthusians, and the Carmelites established large printing workshops at Pisa, Parma, Genoa, and Metz (1476–1482); the Franciscans, surnamed _Frères Conférenciers_, who had a settlement near Gaude, in Holland, also opened a printing-office; and lastly, such celebrated orders as those of Cluny and Cîteaux, branches of the Benedictines, sent for workmen to their houses in Burgundy, at Clervaux, in Champagne, and Montserrat in