One has become accustomed to the heroic tale to the effect that Jesuits succeeded at whatever they set their minds to, and especially that they were the most successful educators in post-Reformation Europe. As Paul Grendler rightly remarks (p. 13), no other religious order was ever founded by a similarly highly educated bunch of young men. The first Jesuits had met at the University of Paris, and the modus parisiensis remained a major source of inspiration as they went on to set up their own schools, colleges and universities across Europe and beyond. Yet, their attempt at establishing themselves within the Italian university landscape was marred by a string of failures, false starts and dead ends. With this detailed study based on rigorous archival research, one of the most eminent experts in early modern Italian university history therefore tells a sobering story. It puts the Jesuits’ achievements in perspective and points to the resilience of Italy's early modern universities despite their perceived decline. Jesuit colleges certainly flourished in Italy too, but contrary to what happened, for example, in central Europe, the order did not achieve a hegemonic position over the established civic university system. Some of the latter's characteristics might indeed explain the Jesuits’ more limited success in Italy. Italian universities served the local urban oligarchies who controlled them; their core faculties were law and medicine, with the arts being mainly propaedeutic, even if important in terms of staff and numbers. Theology, finally, held only a marginal place in Italian universities and its teaching was largely devolved to the religious orders. Jesuits did not teach medicine, nor law. Their condensed curriculum in the arts and philosophy was widely ridiculed by Italian university professors as mediocre at best. Even their theological teaching, so strongly focused on practical casuistry and moral theology and delivered in compact and structured four-year courses, a winning formula especially in Counter-Reformation central Europe, appeared low-brow to the theology professors linked to religious orders, who did not like the ‘new boys on the block’ anyway. The dislike was mutual, as Jesuits found that Italian universities were populated with debauched and undisciplined youths. So where and how, then, did Jesuits get involved? Apart from localised success in marginal universities, two main configurations stand out: one might be called the Messina scenario, in which a city eager to overcome the university monopoly of its neighbour (Catania) reached out to the order; the second scenario was that of territorial princes like the Gonzaga or the Farnese, who sought to add some cultural and religious cachet to their standing by founding (or expanding) a studio with the Jesuits’ help. Yet, even in initially promising cases like Messina, things often went wrong. The city senators dreamt of setting up an Italian-style university with law and medicine, whereas the Jesuits wanted a Jesuit university controlled by the order. The negotiations, rendered in all their minutiae, lasted over fifty years and involved the Jesuit general in Rome, the city élite and the Spanish court. They ended with Messina getting the civic university they wanted, but in which the Jesuits eventually played no role. It is hardly surprising that the ancient and most prestigious universities Bologna and Padua fiercely opposed Jesuit endeavours to get a foothold in their institutions. The Paduan natural philosopher Cesare Cremonini composed a vicious denunciation of the Jesuits as teachers and of their standards of learning, which he called ‘anti-dottrina’ (p. 126). He declared their knowledge of Aristotle as superficial, as they did not use the original text but copied summaries and commentaries of others. Such intellectual hostility combined with Venetian anti-Jesuitism and the general fear of competition for the city's university meant that the Jesuits’ ambitions in Padua were most spectacularly dashed. Cremonini's dossier found interested readers in Bologna, where professors and city senators, fearing the Jesuits’ competition, mounted legal battles to keep them from teaching university subjects. The Fathers were therefore limited to teaching members of their own order, but they did manage to set up a prestigious noble college, which included some higher education teaching even in law, for which they hired external, non-Jesuit instructors. The increasing Jesuit expansion into canon law, whose teaching Ignatius had explicitly prohibited for members of the order, was apparently driven by student demand and the utility of a knowledge of canon law for moral theology. This was to be a major source of contention in Rome. The Roman College was undoubtedly the flagship Jesuit university, and it was so successful in attracting students that exclusion from teaching in the Sapienza was not overly problematic to the order's ambitions. But once the Jesuits started offering canon law classes and the Jesuit General Congregation in 1696 officially allowed the teaching of canon law in all Jesuit colleges and universities, the Sapienza fought back in the courts and won. In 1699 the Roman civic tribunal handed down a judgement that outlawed Jesuit competition in this field. Grendler's study is detailed and rich in quotations from the archival sources, but at times the reader would have welcomed more perspective. The work's largely topographical structure leads to some repetition as the constellations and arguments in the different localities were often similar. A thematic approach might have delivered more concise and analytical results, as suggest the closing chapters that examine the Jesuits’ distinctive philosophical and pedagogical profile and the character of their theological teaching. An appendix with short biographies of Antonio Possevino, Benedetto Palmio, Achille Gagliardi and Juan Alfonso Polanco, who decisively shaped Jesuit educational strategies across the period, also helps to tie together some of the disparate threads produced by the topographical approach. If one could formulate a wish at the end, it would be that a chapter situating the Italian adventures within the European and global history of Jesuit universities had been included.