Although a ‘slightly revised’ PhD dissertation with a very specific focus, this methodologically acute and wide-ranging book has more than one narrative, as the introduction immediately makes clear. The three chapters in Part I reconstruct and contextualize the story of one exquisite and fascinating reliquary, the tenth-century silver-gilt container in the form of a domed, apsed church, which ever since its acquisition at an unknown date by Aachen cathedral has housed the head relic of St Anastasios, a Persian convert to Christianity in the early seventh century. Part II broadens the scope of the enquiry to discuss, in depth, the veneration of head relics in Constantinople, the reception in the West of head relics from Byzantium after 1204, and the subsequent ‘othering’ of Orthodox piety by which the West sought to justify the appropriation of Byzantine cult objects, both re-contextualizing them in terms of Catholic practice, and using them to demonstrate the inferior mentality of relic veneration in the Eastern church. Three appendices deal, successively, with the anatomical terminology of head relics, the real or alleged use of skulls as drinking devices, and a number of precious objects that are related in form, material and technique to the Aachen reliquary.

Part II and the appendices make this a very valuable contribution to the study of relics and reliquaries, not only in Byzantium but also in the West. Chapters 6 and 7 provide useful, sound catalogues raisonnés of information concerning head relics in Constantinople and their western recipients. Especially valuable, in chapter 7 and throughout the book, is the thorough reassessment of idées reçues about reliquary typology, while chapter 8, which deconstructs the ideological basis of traditional scholarly assumptions, is a welcome and long overdue statement of the extent to which all the western sources for eastern relics in western European collections are rooted in the culture of whitewashing the criminal violence of the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204.

As one of the last students of the late Paul Speck, Mabi Angar had the opportunity to develop her forensic and revisionist skills from an early stage in her career, but it was undoubtedly her research on the Aachen reliquary that gave her the tools, and revealed the need, to rewrite the history of Byzantine head relics, their containers, and their transfer to the West. Part I of the book offers an exemplary documentation and contextualization of the silver-gilt aedicula now preserved in the cathedral treasury at Aachen. At the same time, it is an ingenious reconstruction of the object's early history, and as such it is both the most interesting and the most problematic section of the study. We do not know when the aedicula arrived in Aachen before the seventeenth century, nor at what date it came to contain a relic identified as the cranium of St Anastasios the Persian. The only precise information on its Byzantine origins is provided by an inscription on one side invoking the Lord's help for Eustathios, anthypatos, patrikios and strategos of Antioch and Lykandos. In 1982, William Saunders identified this individual as Eustathios Maleinos, cousin of the emperor Nikephoros II, and his period in office as military governor of Antioch, when he commissioned the aedicula, as lasting for a few months in 969. He further hypothesized, from the artefact's stylistic features, that Eustathios had it produced locally, and presented it to the church of Antioch as an artophorion, a container for consecrated bread. There it remained until after the capture of the city by the First Crusade in 1098, when it found its way to the West, and was converted for use as a reliquary.

Angar accepts the date and circumstances of production proposed by Saunders, but disagrees as to the object's original function and its transfer to the West in the period of the Crusades. In chapters 3 and 4, she argues that it was conceived from the outset as a reliquary: there was no particular veneration of St Anastasios in Aachen that would have prompted its adaptation as a receptacle for his relic, and a strong case is made for seeing the piece of micro-architecture, which in its form and its inscribed Psalm texts alludes very clearly to the aedicula over Christ's Tomb in the Anastasis complex in Jerusalem, as a thoroughly appropriate container for a skull relic of a martyr named Anastasios. In chapter 5, the author picks up and develops a ‘dated’ conjecture by Hans Wentzel (1971) that the relic and its container reached Germany as a diplomatic gift to the Ottonian dynasty. To do this, she has to explain how the Byzantine emperor came to have the object at his disposal, and she finds the solution in Basil II's notorious policy of confiscation, which she discusses at length. She concludes that Basil confiscated the reliquary along with other sacred treasures from the church of Antioch when its patriarch Agapios II was accused of treason in 990.

In general, Angar's reconstruction presents a plausible scenario, but it has three snags. First and most serious is the fact that Eustathios Maleinos does not, in his inscription, pray for the intercession of St Anastasios the Persian, which is odd if he commissioned the aedicula as a precious container for the martyr's head. Secondly, would the Byzantine emperor have sent his western counterpart a reliquary that was inscribed neither with the name of the relic it contained, nor with that of the imperial donor, but with the name of a now disgraced Byzantine subject who had commissioned the object for some other beneficiary? Otto III, the most likely recipient in the time frame suggested, would have been especially unimpressed, since he could read Greek. Thirdly, there is no evidence that Basil II confiscated valuables from episcopal churches, as opposed to private monasteries and individuals, and it is a priori extremely unlikely that he would have done so in the case of an august public institution such as the patriarchate of Antioch, which was vital for the restoration of the empire's authority in its newly-reconquered Syrian enclave.

If we suspend judgment on the second of these points, we can get around the other objections by modifying the hypotheses of both Saunders and Angar as follows. Eustathios Maleinos originally commissioned the container as an artophorion for his private chapel, from where Basil II confiscated it along with the rest of Maleinos’ estate in Cappadocia, as recorded by Skylitzes (Angar, pp. 66–71). Being a consecrated object, it was deposited not in the imperial treasury but in one of the palace chapels an Constantinople, from where an emperor, probably Basil II, removed it along with the relic of St Anastasios the Persian, in order to present both as diplomatic gifts to his western counterpart, who was probably Otto III but not impossibly Henry II. The gifts could have been combined in Constantinople or at destination, but either way, if we envisage that the container was improvised as packaging, and not a purpose-made receptacle, this helps us to get around the problem posed by the mismatch between the label on the box and its contents.

It is becoming fashionable to write history through the ‘cultural biography’ of objects. The Aachen reliquary is ideal for this purpose, since it undoubtedly has an interesting medieval story, political as well as cultural, to tell. But it is not a typical story of relic translation – if indeed a typical story existed, outside the general narrative of Western appropriation, which this book re-tells so well.