George Scholarios is well-known for being the first patriarch of Constantinople to take office under Ottoman rule; prominent among his credentials was hostility to the western Church in general and the Union of Florence in particular. He articulated his opposition in vehement tracts and numerous letters. After the death of Mark Eugenikos in 1445, he thrust himself forward as the champion of doctrinal orthodoxy, urging fellow members of the Byzantine ‘Establishment’ to reject the terms agreed upon at the Council of Florence. Doubts have therefore hung over the authenticity of four speeches sympathetic to Church Union which Scholarios appears to have composed shortly before and during the council. Marie-Hélène Blanchet reaffirms the position taken by Joseph Gill a generation ago, adducing powerful new arguments in favour of the authenticity of the speeches and of other texts that Scholarios composed at that time. Exhaustive examination of other texts indubitably attributable to Scholarios has revealed allusions to his acceptance of Union during the council, which he attended as imperial secretary and professor of philosophy. In his very condemnation of Bessarion for failing to consult him on the alleged consensus of the Greek and Latin Fathers, Scholarios implies that he was himself then aligned with advocates of Union. Bessarion had not taken Scholarios into his inner circle, for all the theological tracts in support of Union he was writing around this time. Besides rehabilitating the four speeches, Blanchet shows how their internal inconsistencies reflect ‘the real instability of Scholarios’ thought on Union' as the council wore on (p. 344). His subsequent volte-face was drastic yet quite effectively obfuscated, and Blanchet has performed a feat of scholarly detection in laying it bare, while also showing that he was only a minor player at Florence. Personal pique and opportunism played their part in Scholarios's emergence as a hard-line opponent of Union, but Blanchet depicts him with subtlety as essentially a creature of his time. A highly educated scion of the elite, Scholarios had initially sought advancement within the imperial Constantinopolitan administration and, for want of opportunities there, contemplated prospects in the Morea and even the Latin west. He seems to have believed in the empire and was, by the time of Florence, in an awkward position. Now one of John viii Palaiologos's personal advisors, he felt obliged to follow the Unionist line which John imposed on his delegation. Yet the manner of the council's proceedings undermined his initial assumption that an ‘authentic’ Union, covering points of theology, would emerge through free discussion and by the end of the council his public stance amounted to oikonomia, the pragmatic consideration that Constantinople would fall to the Turks without western help. Scholarios's dilemma was a personal one, but Blanchet shows that opinion in Byzantine intellectual circles was more variegated than is often supposed. In fact Scholarios seems, in the later 1440s, to have brought order and direction to what had previously been rather inchoate objections to the Union. Besides determining questions such as how often Scholarios occupied the patriarchal throne – in reality, only once, from 1454 until 1456 – Blanchet offers important new charts of the cross-currents pervading the Byzantine elite as the old order passed.