There have been numerous references to relics among the secondary literature about the early Irish Church, but this is the first time that a whole book has been devoted to the subject. It is a very good book, and a very thorough examination of the material, using a combination of history, language and archaeology to build up a picture of how the importance of relics grew as the early centuries of Christianity in Ireland progressed. With a dearth of sources from the fifth and sixth centuries, the author has had to rely on the following three centuries to come up with the necessary evidence, and to extrapolate backwards from them. This is particularly the case with Tirechán, the seventh-century biographer of St Patrick, writing two hundred years after the death of his subject, and making one query the actual historical authenticity of his text. The bibliography demonstrates the great breadth of the author's reading, and her extensive knowledge of the late antique and subsequent centuries, through authors such as Peter Brown, have helped her to show that the early Irish Church, instead of developing independently of Rome, was in fact treating relics in the same way as the continent. Her intensive research into the meaning of various Old Irish words used in connection with relics, corporeal and, later, associative, has managed to throw a whole new light on the various uses of relics, in consecrating churches, promulgating laws, for healing, as objects to swear on ‒ and for raising money by being toured around the country. This was done in metal reliquaries which were used as early as around 600, and which became more popular as the centuries followed one another, bringing greater glory to the saints themselves but also to the Church and political powers involved with them. Ireland not having had any martyrs at that early period, it could not proliferate relics as Rome could do, but it could produce objects from the saints’ lives such as bells and crosiers, along with brandea, cloth materials which had touched the tomb and the soil in which a saint had been buried. As on the continent, the relics could be translated from place to place for a variety of reasons, including fostering good relations between individual groupings, political and religious. But, by contrast, ownership of relics was often disputed, as big players such as Armagh, Kildare, Kells, Clonmacnois and even Clonard vied for importance, depending on their relics, with Armagh usually winning out in the hierarchy. Pilgrimage, which brought the common people to pay their respects to the saints’ relics throughout the country, is an associated topic rarely touched upon, and the addition of a few pictures would not have come amiss.