Galit Noga-Banai is quite right in saying that the existing standard catalogue and discussion of early Christian silver reliquaries (H. Buschhausen, Die spätrömischen Metallscrinia und frühchristlichen Reliquiare, Vienna 1971) is both incomplete and out of date. Her own new catalogue (pp. 155–63) is excellent. Moreover, although the model of gathering all the pictures in the back might be thought rather conservative, in general the quality is high and the press is to be congratulated upon it. But instead of delivering a synthetic discussion of the objects concerned, Noga-Banai chooses, strangely, to focus upon four of them in detail. Two of her three chapters are hugely learned and up-to-date iconographic discussions of the chosen objects (the Nea Herakleia casket, the Capsella Brivio, the Capsella Vaticana and the oval casket from Grado, dating between the fourth and the later sixth centuries) which meander with some muddiness and tedium around a series of issues (such as function, provenance, date and relation with other known objects) which no amount of style art history or iconographic analysis can ever fully deliver in the absence of other data. The awful question hovering in the back of my mind (uttered in the dread voice of my late supervisor, Keith Hopkins) is what is the point of it all? The chief problem, apart from not seeing the wood for the trees in relation to what a chosen method of study can deliver, is the reductive sense of relevant comparanda. Iconography in any period is above all about ideology (meaning not necessarily a strong position foisted by one party on another, but rather an agreed frame of concepts within which a culture can pose its problems and formulate not only its answers but those fissures to which there are no answers). But Noga-Banai, despite all her learning, makes no attempt to go in this kind of direction, either to a comparison of similar themes in the literary culture (poetry, sermons and so forth) or in the visual culture (except for narrow comparisons of date and style). The last chapter does a better job of putting her reliquary caskets more closely into the context of the rise of the cult of relics. But even this is still reductive in choosing a historical framework for the placing of her works of art, as opposed to a broad conceptual frame of how this kind of object might be seen to interfere in the history of ancient metalwork and boxes, the history of objects used in liturgy or ritual etc. To do this would require much more contextualisation – especially in relating the caskets Noga-Banai discusses with other boxes from late antiquity, and in particular from pagan contexts. It may be that the argument in which one hopes to cast a particular set of issues or objects in the past is muddled or fuzzy; and it may be that the past one aims to clarify is itself so obscure as to resist even sharp and incisive argument; unfortunately, sometimes, both these options may simultaneously be the case.