In the book The Cult of Relics in Early Medieval Ireland, Niamh Wycherley sets out to reassess the role of the cult of relics in the early Irish Church from the seventh to the ninth centuries. Her findings support viewing this important aspect of early Irish religious practice as generally in-line with the widespread practices of saints’ relics veneration in the continental church and, as such, this discussion participates in a larger scholarly debate regarding the ‘uniqueness’ of the Celtic Church and religious practices in Ireland. While this work is clearly aimed at the specialist in early Irish ecclesiastical history and/or the early medieval cult of relics, and will be challenging to those not at least somewhat familiar with these fields, it is a careful and nuanced study that provides an important contribution to our understanding of the early Irish Church.

In chapter one, Wycherley sets the background by discussing the nature of relic veneration in the early medieval continental church, its connections to the cult of the hero, and the nature of potency as it related to corporeal and associative relics. In a section titled “The Irish Context” (31), she provides a good introduction to the social and religious state of early Christian Ireland, making the point that Ireland was not quite as cut off from the Roman Christian world as is often assumed, even in the time of St. Patrick. Ireland developed a monastic structure that deviated from the continental episcopal norm, clung to many pagan traditions, and even engaged in some well-known disputes with the continental church. Yet, despite nonconformities in these and other respects, Wycherley argues that in terms of relic veneration, the early Irish clerics adhered to church norms. She then sets out to examine the role of corporeal relics in the early Irish Church. Chapter two establishes that Irish thought was in line with that of the continental church in regarding a saint's body as the most significant relic and its location as a site of pilgrimage. It is for this reason that Rome was regarded as the preeminent pilgrimage site that all clerics hoped to visit. Nevertheless, Irish churches that acquired Roman relics (brought by St. Patrick, as the Church of Armagh claimed), or possessed relics of the early Irish saints, were quick to use them in power struggles with one another. Early churches such as Armagh and Kildare were clearly aware of the importance of corporeal relics: they used them to buttress their political standing and compete with each other for preeminence. In the hagiographies composed within these churches’ walls, even the saints themselves are shown to have an awareness of the potency of their own corporeal relics; even St. Patrick bestowed a loose tooth upon a favored disciple (44)! Through a mixture of textual and archaeological evidence, Wycherley makes a clear case for recognizing that corporeal relics mattered to early Irish clerics and churches, in both a fundamental and politically astute way.

Chapters three and four focus on the ceremonial and monumental use of relics. Chapter three discusses the evidence for the importance and formality of translatio ceremonies, which entailed the moving of a saint's remains. Chapter four discusses the use of relics as a central feature of church ceremony through their inclusion inside the structure of the altar in both continental and insular churches. In both instances, Wycherley continues to pursue the deeper point of demonstrating continuity between the Irish and continental churches, rather than a unique path of development in Ireland.

Serving these ceremonial functions eventually led to relics becoming symbolic of ecclesiastical communities themselves, and relics might therefore be used as gifts to cement the bonds between two churches. Chapters five and six trace these symbolic developments in the function of relics. Chapter five discusses the use of relics in early Irish society: as the mediators of prayer, guarantors of oaths, and legitimizers of authority, relics became an important arm of the Irish Church to appeal to the public and solidify the central importance of the church in Early Irish communities. Chapter six traces the increasing annalistic references to relic circuits in the later medieval period. As associative relics such as saints’ bells, staffs, and books were more accessible and portable than their corporeal counterparts, they became more popular and commonly used as vehicles for the church in the community in the later period. This chapter, and the main course of the book's argument, concludes with a discussion of this ‘public’ use of relics and the extension of power and authority in the early Irish Church that it represents. It is here that we see the broad significance of the work. While an in-depth discussion of the nature and use of relics in early Ireland might at first appear to be a topic that is somewhat obscure, the fundamental connection of relics to Church power—and of Church power to dynastic power—make it an issue of deep significance.

Overall, the book does tend to read like the revised doctoral thesis that it is, which, coupled with the complex and specialized subject matter, can at times give it a ‘dense’ nature. That said, Wycherley makes a clear and decisive case for both the significance of the cult of relics in the early Irish Church and the general continuity of its development with continental relic devotion. Her work, therefore, contributes to an important re-situation of the Irish Church within the wider spectrum of medieval Christianity, rather than as a constant outlier.