Paul Grendler, one of the foremost authorities on universities in Renaissance Italy, offers the history of Mantua's short-lived experiment with higher education in The University of Mantua, the Gonzaga, and the Jesuits. Mantua's university, for Grendler, is as much a story of the ducal Gonzaga family as of the Jesuits and their ambitions to enter into Italian academic life. To illustrate this, Grendler details the wider political, economic and religious contexts leading up to the university's foundation, arguing that, in many respects, the Jesuits and the Gonzaga were ideal bed-fellows. Supported by wealth from their territories in the Mantovano and Monferrato, and driven by dynastic connections, the Gonzaga were constantly searching for means to consolidate their rule and add prestige to their ducal status. Unable to break into the academic establishment of other Italian universities, the Jesuits were more than willing to offer their academic and religious services when Ferdinando i, the most humanistically-educated of the Gonzaga princes, set about bringing his university into existence. Friendly relations between the Gonzaga and the Society of Jesus in previous years and a Gonzaga Jesuit saint certainly also helped to cement their bond. Despite its brief existence (1624–30), according to Grendler, the university was an ‘innovative institution’ and ‘accomplished a good deal’ (p. 250). Grendler points out quite rightly that the joint religious and lay academic venture greatly expanded the Jesuit educational influence in northern Italy. The Jesuits were able to offer Mantuan students rigorous preparation in core university disciplines at a fraction of cost of lay teachers, which later spawned a generation of important writers and musicians from Mantua. Equally important, Grendler demonstrates that the Jesuits' presence at the university did not impede in any way the innovative research and thought of Fabrizio Bartoletti (the discoverer of lactose) and Giacomo Antonio Marta in the medical and legal faculties respectively. Indeed, the university was a rare model of academic cooperation between religious and lay faculty, however briefly. For his study Grendler draws on a good range of archival sources, including key correspondence between Ferdinando and key Jesuit and lay figures from the universities, from Mantua and other Italian universities. He also provides an extremely useful biographical appendix of Jesuit professors at Mantua, as well as excellent genealogical trees of the Gonzaga and detailed maps. Convincingly researched, argued and written, Grendler's book is a valuable and much-needed study on a neglected university, one that could have ranked with Padua and Bologna if only dynastic politics and war had not destroyed it. The study will be of immense use to anyone interested in university and religious history in early modern Italy.