One of the puzzling features of late antiquity is the way in which a growing emphasis on the significance of the spiritual, a sense of its overwhelming reality, in the end yields a sense of the importance of the bodily. The platonic strands that early Christians found so congenial might have been thought to lead Christians away from the bodily to a sense of the spiritual as the truly real, and could certainly make common cause with the otherworldliness that characterised much early Christianity. It is, however, easy to point to elements in Christianity that stubbornly emphasise the bodily: the doctrine of the incarnation itself – ‘the Word became flesh’ – the sacraments, which are essentially material, the eschatological hope in the resurrection of the body. Also, Christian ethical teaching was not satisfied with intention, but laid stress on quite real and practical acts of love – visiting the sick, clothing the naked, feeding the hungry. In this book Patricia Cox Miller tries to bring this aspect of Christianity in late antiquity into focus. Most of the elements mentioned are grist to her mill – though there is little about eschatological hope or Christian charity – but they are presented in a way that is intended to bring out what Cox Miller calls the ‘material turn’ in late antiquity. Cox Miller is familiar with turns: in earlier works we have encountered the ‘linguistic turn’ and the closely related ‘cultural turn’. Whatever else is entailed by talking of turns, it signifies a shift of perspective, discerned by the use of novel theoretical approaches. In this case, it is ‘thing theory’, associated with Bill Brown, which is to do with the way in which objects can come to be reified. This is the focus of Cox Miller's approach. Theological issues come under her purview, but she is not interested in the theology as such. The doctrine of the incarnation is important, but not Christological controversy. She is more interested in the way in which the incarnation makes the tangible – what ‘our hands have handled’, though I don't think she quotes 1 John – of deep import. Eucharistic doctrine is important, but for the way in which it makes the eucharistic presence tangible, sometimes in strikingly crude ways. These theological notions are not the direct object of Cox Miller's investigation, though they are drawn in when useful. A first chapter focuses on the way in which the body becomes integral to a distinctively Christian sense of the self, though Cox Miller notes parallels in the developing Neoplatonism of late antiquity. Relics then become the focus of attention: occupying space and therefore locality, but able to transcend (or extend) locality as relics are fragmented and set out on their travels. The setting of relics attracts her attention and the different sense of the bodily that bejewelled reliquaries convey. Accounts of the martyrs are often intensely visual, and this too attracts Cox Miller's attention. There is a kind of transition to the icon from the relic, partly through the reliquary, and also through the evlogia, the pilgrim token taken as a blessing, which often incorporated an iconic representation of the saint: for instance, the embossed oil lamps that seem to have been very popular at the shrine of St Symeon the Stylite. Cox Miller pursues this transition through to the icon itself, in its many different forms. This leads into a field in which there is a wealth of secondary literature, of which Cox Miller demonstrates a broad command. But she is still very interested in the interplay between image and text, and explores the role icons play in the lives of the saints, the way in which the material intersects with the narrative. There is a great deal of interest in this book, but I left it with a sense of dissatisfaction, the source of which is not entirely clear to me, despite rereading various chapters of the book. It has something to do with a gap between the theory associated with the material turn and the many detailed discussions that the book consists of. There is a kind of décalage, a failure to engage, with the result that it is not clear what all the examples add up to. This is heightened by the sense of haste. There is great deal discussed: both many examples and lots of problems touched on, without its being entirely clear why (they are certainly not solved, and I don't think Cox Miller thinks they have been, either). Part of the problem is a common problem in late antique studies in that a modern, apparently illuminating, theory is applied to late antique texts as if these were raw material, whereas in fact they are all highly theorised already, and the original perspective cannot just be wished away. One needs, for example, to ask what some of the astonishingly crude theories of bleeding hosts meant to those who recorded them; they are certainly not ‘facts’ recorded out of interest. The central notion of the book, however, is important and timely. There is a story, well told by Dronke (in a work not mentioned by Cox Miller), about the development of the notion of the imagination in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages that is part of the ‘material turn’ in which Cox Miller is interested. It is a conflicted story, for a negative attitude to the imagination never disappears within Christianity of this period. Another story concerns the way in which asceticism, with its rather negative concern with the body, evolves a positive appreciation of the body, precisely because of the attention it attracts. The theological elements mentioned earlier do more than just occasion the attention to the body that Cox Miller explores; they provide criteria for understanding, too. That this book provokes such reflection is a sign that Cox Miller has mined a rich vein of religious cultural history, but that there is plenty there for others to excavate.