Built up gradually between the fifth and the twelfth century, the legend of St Ursula and her 11,000 virgin companions, supposedly slaughtered by Huns after a pilgrimage to Rome, was given new impetus in 1106 by the discovery of a vast number of bones to the north of the city of Cologne. By the thirteenth century, relics of the 11,000 virgins had spread across Europe and confraternities devoted to the martyrs began to appear. The cult is best known through the elaborate Clarenaltar in Cologne Cathedral with its many reliquary busts, the fifteenth-century paintings of Ursula's pilgrimage by Memling and Carpaccio, and the seventeenth-century Goldene Kammer in Cologne, whose elaborate decoration is made up almost entirely of gilded skulls and parts of skeletons. Scott Montgomery's study of the cult, particularly of its manifestations in art, is characterised by sensitive art-historical interpretation of reliquaries, altarpieces and panel paintings. His most original point is the way in which the virgins were understood not as individuals but as a martyred group, which came also to serve as an urban defence; the cult therefore provided a model of collective identity to cloistered religious and urban dwellers alike. Some of Montgomery's most perceptive interpretations of reliquaries and altars rest in his skilful deployment of this notion of collective identity, which he sees as underlying the unusual stylistic unity of the reliquary busts in Cologne and in other venues as well. There are, however, limitations to this monograph. Discussion of the historical background to the cult and its complex development is merely a summary of the work of other scholars. Certain larger issues that Montgomery alludes to need much fuller investigation than they receive: the relationship of relic to reliquary and their different respective roles in evoking viewer response; the social and religious context of the shift of emphasis from the group of 11,000 to the cult of Ursula as protector in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the nature of ‘imaginative pilgrimage,’ to which he frequently refers but which he never defines or elucidates; and the role of mimesis in reliquaries, especially reliquary busts. Montgomery assumes, without argument or exploration, that faces and heads make a special visual impact. Moreover, some of the force of the book is vitiated by awkward writing and excessive repetition, for which the author apologises in his first chapter but which he would have done better simply to deal with.