8/10/2019 Turin Shroud Was Made for Medieval Easter Ritual

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Turin shroud was made for medieval Easter ritual, historian says

Charlotte Higgins ("The Guardian," October 23, 2014)

When it is exhibited next year in Turin, for the first time in five years, 2 million people are expected to

pour into the city to venerate a four-metre length of woven cloth as the shroud in which Jesus Christ

was wrapped after his crucifixion, and on to which was transferred his ghostly image.

Despite the fact that the cloth was radiocarbon-dated to the 14th century in 1988, an array of theories

continue to be presented to support its authenticityincluding, this year, the idea from scientists at the

Politecnico di Torino that an earthquake in AD 33 may have caused a release of neutrons responsible for

the formation of the image.

But, according to research by British scholar and author Charles Freeman, to be published in the journal

History Today, the truth is that the shroud is not only medieval, just as the radiocarbon dating suggests,

but that it is likely to have been created for medieval Easter ritualsan explanation that flies in the faceof what he called intense and sometimes absurd speculation that coalesces around it.

Freeman, the author of Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe,

studied early descriptions and illustrations of the shroud. None predates 1355, the year of its first

documented appearance in a chapel in Lirey near Troyes in France, before it was acquired by the House

of Savoy in 1453 and converted into a high-prestige relicto shore up the power base of the insecure

Alpine dukedom.

In particular, he turned up a little-known engraving by Antonio Tempesta, an artist attached to the

Savoyard court, who made a meticulously detailed image of one of the ceremonial displays of the cloth

to pilgrims in 1613.

Astonishingly, he writes, few researchers appear to have grasped that the shroud looked very

different in the 16th and 17th centuries from the object we see today.

The Tempesta engraving, as well as a number of 15th- and 16th-century first-hand descriptions,

emphasise a feature that is much less obvious nowthat the figure was covered in blood and scourge

marks, relating to Christs flagellation. These extensive markings can be explicitly related, argues

Freeman, to a focus on blood in depictions of the crucifixion that emerged in the 14th century a

dramatic change in iconography that sharply differentiates depictions of the crucified Christ from

those of earlier centuries, and which reflects revelations of a bloody, wounded Christ reported by

mystics such as Julian of Norwich in the 14th century.

The original purpose of the shroud, argues Freeman, is likely to have been as a prop in a kind of

medieval, theatrical ceremony that took place at Easterthe Quem quaeritis? or whom do you seek?

On Easter morning the gospel accounts of the resurrection would be re-enacted with disciples acting

out a presentation in which they would enter a makeshift tomb and bring out the grave clothes to show

that Christ had indeed risen,he said.

8/10/2019 Turin Shroud Was Made for Medieval Easter Ritual

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Freemans idea was shored up by his study of the earliest illustration of the shroud on a pilgrim badge

of the 1350s found in the Seine in 1855. On it, two clerics hold up the shroud, and beneath is an empty

tomb.

The church officially regards the shroud with an open mind: as a object to be venerated as a reminder of

Christs passion, rather than, necessarily, the physical imprint of his body.

Next year, millions of pilgrims will beg to disagreeas they will with Freemans argument that places

the shroud at the birth of northern European drama rather than at the dawn of Christianity, and that

identifies the images on it as traces of a crude and limited painting of the 14th century.