=2. The Universities and the Book-trade.= The book-dealers of Paris, beginning their work as part of the organisation of the university, had their first quarters in the immediate vicinity of the college buildings. The foundation of the College of the Sorbonne dates from 1257. The college had been instituted by Robert de Sorbon, chaplain to Louis IX, from whom it took its name. It was at once affiliated to the university, the work of which had begun about half a century earlier. The college assumed the control of the theological instruction in the university and the divines of the Sorbonne exercised from the outset a controlling influence over the general policy of the university. The theological faculty took charge, on behalf of the university, of the censorship of the Paris book-trade and of the productions of the Paris press. It based its authority for this censorship in part on the fact that the book-dealers had from the earliest manuscript period been under the direction of the university, and in part on the authority of the Church. The dealers who did not secure a license from the university occupied as their locality the precincts of Notre Dame on the island of La Cité. Throughout Europe, in fact, the earlier book-dealers carried on their business very frequently under the immediate shadow of the cathedral if not within its portals. In Cologne, for instance, the manuscript-dealers in the early part of the 15th century took possession for their shops or booths of various corners or angles of the cathedral building; while in Münster was allotted to them the court immediately in front of the cathedral. There is a reference as early as 1408, in one of the Strasburg chronicles, to the scribes who sold books on the steps of the Cathedral of Our Lady.