With the invention of printing, the universities (with the exception of Paris) lost their control over the business of book production, and there resulted necessarily a decrease in their influence and relative importance in the community. They continued to lay claim to the control of censorship but this claim could not be supported in the face of the direct action of the Church on the one hand, and that of the civil authorities on the other. Paulsen[91] writes: “The tradition of the universities, and, in particular, their method of instruction in the arts and in theology, were rejected with scorn by the new educator through its representatives, the poets and the orators,” to whom the form and the substance of this teaching seemed alike to be barbarism. The _Epistolae obscurorum virorum_, published in 1516, was the work of a band of youthful poets working under the leadership of Mutianus at Erfurt; it expressed the hatred and detestation felt by the Humanists for the ancient university system. Within a few years from the publication of the _Epistolae_, the influence of the Humanists had so far extended itself as to have effected a large modification in the systems of study in all the larger universities. The ecclesiastical Latin was replaced by classical Latin; and the old translations of the Aristotelian texts were driven out by new versions representing more exact scholarship. Greek was taken up in the faculty of arts, and courses in its language and literature were established in nearly all the universities. This change was coincident with the shifting of the authority for censorship from the hands of the university theologians to those of the direct representatives of the pope or of the State. The strifes and contentions of the Reformation checked for a time the development in the universities of the studies connected with the intellectual movement of the Renaissance, and lessened the demand for the literature of these studies. The active-minded were absorbed in theological controversy, while those who could not understand the questions at issue could still shout the shibboleths of the leaders. As Erasmus puts it, rather bitterly: _ubi regnat Lutheranismus, ibi interitus litterarum_. The literature of the Reformation, however, itself did much to make good for the printing-presses the lessened demand for the classics, while, a few years later, the organisation in Germany of the Protestant schools and universities aroused intellectual activities in new regions and created fresh requirements for printed books. Within half a century of the Diet of Worms, the centre of the book-absorbing population of Germany had been transferred from the Catholic States of the south to the Protestant territories of the north and the literary preponderance of the latter has continued to increase during the succeeding generations. Mark Pattison says[92]: