The position may be further illustrated by comparing the first productions of the press on either side of the Alps:  in the early days, before the export trade had developed, and when books were produced mainly for the home market.  The Germans who brought the art down into Italy, Sweynheym and Pannartz at Rome, Wendelin and Jenson at Venice, printed scarcely anything that was not classical:  Latin authors and Latin translations from the Greek.  Up in the North the first printers of Germany, Fust and Schoeffer at Mainz, Mentelin at Strasburg, rarely overstepped the boundaries of the mediaeval world that was passing away or the modern that was taking its place.

The appearance of the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum in 1515 exposed the scholastic teachers and their allies in the Church to such widespread ridicule that it is not easy for us now to realize the position which those dignitaries still held when Erasmus was young.  The stream of contempt poured upon them by the triumphant humanists obscures the merit of their system as a gigantic and complete engine of thought.  Under its great masters, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, scholasticism had been rounded into an instrument capable of comprehending all knowledge and of expressing every refinement of thought; and, as has been well said, the acute minds that created it, if only they had extended their inquiries into natural science, might easily have anticipated by centuries the discoveries of modern days.[39] In expressing their distinctions the Schoolmen had thrown to the winds the restraints of classical Latin and the care of elegance; and with many of them language had degenerated into jargon.  But in their own eyes their position was unassailable.  Their philosophy was founded on Aristotle; and while they were proud of their master, they were prouder still of the system they had created in his name:  and thus they felt no impulse to look backwards to the past.

     [39] Cf.  F.G.  Stokes, Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, 1909, p.
          xvii.

In the matter of language they had been led by a spirit of reaction.  The literature of later classical times had sacrificed matter to form; and the schools had been dominated by teachers who trained boys to declaim in elegant periods on any subject whatever, regardless of its content; thus carrying to an extreme the precepts with which the great orators had enforced the importance of style.  The Schoolmen swung the pendulum back, letting sound and froth go and thinking only of their subject-matter, despising the classics.  In their turn they were confronted by the humanists, who reasserted the claims of form.