The dramatic expansion of Roman Catholicism in the New World and East Indies in the early modern period has led historians to underestimate the importance that contemporaries continued to place on possibilities for expansion – or should one say recovery – nearer at hand. In a woodblock print celebrating the deeds of Pope Gregory xiii (1572–85) by Marc Antonio Ciappi, of the forty buildings and events which frame the pope's bust portrait, over half (twenty-three) are devoted to the seminaries and colleges that he founded throughout the Roman Catholic world for the training of priests and the preparation of converts. Pride of place – in the first row at the top of the woodcut immediately to the right of the large central image of the Jesuit-run Roman College, which Gregory had effectively refounded in 1572 and whose descendant still bears his name as the Gregorian University – is given to the Greek College in Rome set up in 1576 to train young Christians from the east in Roman Catholic orthodoxy so that on their return they would be persuasive ambassadors for Rome. Just three years before, the papal Congregation of the Greeks, a standing committee dedicated to the reform of the Greek clergy in Italy, which included such important cardinals as Sirleto, Santoro and Savelli, had been set up. A notable early success and justification for this policy can be seen from the fact that one of the college's early students was Petrus Arcudius, who helped to engineer the unification of the Polish-Lithuanian Orthodox with the Catholic Church in 1596. It usually goes without comment that the first issue to be dealt with at the Council of Trent (1545–63), after the procedural practicalities had been established, was not the doctrine of justification but the sources of ecclesiastical tradition, including, of course, the authority of the church councils. Prominent amongst these was the Council of Florence (1439), the significance of which for Pope Gregory and his successors lay in its decree of the Union between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. Under Urban viii (1623–44) this became, once more, a pressing interest since the Patriarch of Constantinople, Cyrillos Lucaris, who had been elected in 1620, was a man of clearly Protestant sympathies. Accordingly, one of the first publications financed by Urban's nephew, Cardinal Francesco, was a new edition of this council's decrees (in about 1626 – the edition has no date). The pope went on to publish a Professio orthodoxae fidei in 1633 which set out the dogmas which members of the Greek Orthodox Church would be required to sign up to if they wanted to be fully accepted back into the Roman Church. Throughout this text the emphasis was on the congruence between the professions of faith expressed therein and those of the earliest ecumenical and Byzantine councils, and thus by implication a critique of the degree to which seventeenth-century members of the Orthodox Church had lost sight of their origins and betrayed their orthodoxy. This was a direct response to Lucaris's own Calvinist-inspired confession, which he had published in Latin in 1629 and, revealingly, was printed in Geneva. In order to prevent the Greek Church from becoming not only schismatic but heretical, papal agents conspired not only with Lucaris's ambitious rivals but also with the sultan himself, together with the local Jesuits, to have the patriarch removed forcibly from the scene. In 1638 he was duly murdered. It is within this anything but dry-as-dust academic context that the foundation of the Academia Basiliana needs to be set. Although it was short-lived – the twenty-seven surviving lectures (out of a total of forty-two) were delivered between June 1635 and August 1640 – the academicians dedicated themselves to the full range of relevant fields. These are the subject of parts iii and iv of Herklotz's study (after an introductory part i, part ii is given over to the academy's membership and organisation). They ranged, as one might expect from a membership that included such polymaths as Leone Allacci and Lucas Holstenius, from an anti-Galilean interpretation of the Pythagorean concept of antichthon (counter earth) in terms of its numerical symbolism so that it concurred with the orthodox, geocentric vision of the universe, to a reconsideration of the language of the Septuagint, which was seen to be a mixture of Hebrew and Greek and therefore inherently problematic and unsuitable as a model for establishing a text which could claim more authority than Jerome's Vulgate, whose canonical status had been reasserted at Trent. However, what united them all was their confessional purpose and emphasis, which is even clearer if one takes into account the fact that the clear majority of the lectures related to Christian rites and devotional practices. These included the cult of saints, use of sacred images, commemoration of the dead, vestments, sacred music, fasting, early rites of greeting as well as the kiss of peace. The direct, practical relevance of such topics as a guide to contemporary practice is made even more evident by the attention paid also to the positioning of the altar within the church as well as to the desirable orientation for ecclesiastical buildings. It is within this context that Herklotz analyses (in part v) the enterprise sponsored by Cardinal Francesco to have painted copies made of mosaic and wall frescoes from Rome's oldest churches, a project carried out, according to the painter and art historian Giovanni Baglione (1566–1644), ‘to reawaken amongst the faithful memories of the rites and customs of the primitive church’. Indeed, for Herklotz a guiding principle of these academicians appears to have been the desire to harmonise Greek Christian thought of the past with current Roman Catholic practice. Such a practical concern was also behind the initiative which, Herklotz argues, helped to shorten the already brief life of the Academia in 1640. This was the project to prepare a new edition of the Eucologium graecum, an important collection of liturgical texts that Philip iv of Spain wished to make available to his Greek rite subjects in the Kingdom of Naples. This necessitated the setting up of a dedicated papal congregation with Francesco Barberini at its head and involving several key members of the Academia. Between 1636 and 1645 the congregation met no fewer than eighty-two times. This much narrower but more systematic initiative to refurbish the daily cult of the Italian peninsula's Greek rite Roman Catholics undoubtedly distracted the Academia's principal patron from the far more ambitious cultural agenda promoted by the latter, which was nothing less than the religious unification of east and west. Now, thanks to Herklotz's patient research and prodigious learning it is possible, once again, to appreciate the significance of this hitherto largely invisible chapter in the history of ecclesiastical scholarship during the age of confessionalisation.