TheTurin Shroud Contradicts the Gospels

So, it is well known that the 'blood-stains' on the Shroud suggest that the person who was crucified had nails driven through his wrists, not his hands.

And it has been decided that this is in fact the most likely historical way in which crucifixion would have happened (the palms of the hands would just tear from the weight of the body, and so nails driven through then would be no good).

But in the passage after the Resurrection relating to Doubting Thomas, Thomas and the other disciples examing the wounds in Christ's side and HANDS, not his wrists. So has the Bible got it wrong, or has the Shroud?

The Turin Shroud and the So-Called Evidence of a Medieval Manuscript

The BBC broadcast a new documentary on the Turin Shroud during the Easter weekend. Some of it was very interesting (perhaps I will come back to this in future), but for me the whole thing was undermined by the misuse of so-called 'evidence', which supposedly proved that the Shroud had been seen by an artist in the 12th century, more than a century before the dating provided by Carbon-14 analysis.

A manuscript in Budapest known as the Pray Codex has a full-page miniature in two tiers depicting The Entombment above, and The Maries at the Sepulchre below:

The lower scene, it was claimed, not only shows the distinctive herring-bone pattern of the weave of the shroud fabric, but also shows an 'L'-shaped pattern of holes, which precisely match a pattern of burn-holes in the shroud.

The origin of these two claims, which have been repeated often by students of the Shroud who claim to be sceptical seekers-after-the-truth rather than religious believers wishing to support their beliefs (do a Google search for the word Shroud and the phase "pray codex"), seems to have gained wide currency from the book by Ian Wilson, The Blood and the Shroud. Interestingly, Wilson did not make any claims about the herring-bone pattern: anyone remotely familiar with medieval Resurrection iconography can see that this herring-bone pattern is not on the shroud at all, but the lid of the tomb, which is depicted with a pattern probably intended to represent marble, and that the shroud is the smaller object on top of the patterned tomb-lid.

Wilson did, however, 'enhance' the image in his book to make meaningless marks appear to be in a deliberate 'L'-shaped pattern:



Only when Shroud-Believers stop misusing evidence like this (whether they do it through ignorance, or deliberately) can they hope to be taken seriously; until then they should not be surprised if they are viewed as fanatics blinded by their faith.

Negrone Hours sold at TEFAF

Acording to Bloomberg.com Heribert Tenschert has sold the so-called Negrone Hours for 5,000,000 Euros at the TEFAF art fair:

"We've seen fewer Americans, but our sales have been much better than last year,'' said Swiss-based medieval-manuscript dealer Heribert Tenschert, who sold the early 16th-century Flemish 'Negrone Hours' for 5 million euros at the preview to a European collector who also buys contemporary art.

Thoughts on Facsimiles, Pt. II

I went this evening to a session at London University Library about facsimiles of medieval manuscripts, organised for the Friends of the Library: a thinly disguised attempt to persuade the Friends to help pay for future facsimile purchases. A very laudable exercise, I thought, that also promised to be interesting. Instead it was a disappointment and a missed opportunity.

The first speaker, slated to talk about the value of facsimiles for research, instead gave a potted history of the use of reproductions of manuscripts (not facsimiles in the usual modern sense), and talked of the benefit that can come from assembling a team of specialists, or even a single specialist, to write a commentary volume containing new research. But there was almost nothing about the use of the resulting facsimile for future research, or the ways in which the publication of a facsimile benefits scholarship. As I suggest below (Thoughts on Facsimiles, Pt. I) many different kinds of reproduction can be a useful surrogate for the original manuscript—microfilms are the most obvious example, because despite their variable quality, they do usually include the complete manuscript, rather than just a selection of pages—but there is usually no mechanism for the researcher to locate copies of microfilms, and physically consulting them can be problematic.

The second speaker was supposed to talk about computers and the digital world as regards facsimiles, but instead spoke in very theoretical terms about things like how and representation of material culture is a re-presentation of the old into something new. Interesting, but largely irrelevant.

The third speaker was a publisher, who talked about the making of facsimiles. He was the most relevant, by giving the audience some idea of why high-quality facsimiles have to be so expensive.

Thoughts on Facsimiles, Pt. I

I recently had reason to go to a national library in a foreign European capital to consult one of their most famous manuscripts. A high quality facsimile of the manuscript was published by one of the leading facsimile publishers more than a decade ago, but if COPAC is a reliable guide, no research library in the UK owns a copy of the facsimile, and only the Bodleian Library owns a copy of the commentary. (I went to Oxford to consult it, and very useful it was too.)

For more than a year I had been trying to persuade the British Library to acquire a copy (it relates closely to some of their own manuscripts), but although they were willing in principle, it was not straightforward: the facsimile is now out of print, and when I alerted them to a copy coming up at auction (which went on to sell for about a third of its original retail price) they were not able to act quickly enough. To their credit they did eventually secure a copy from a Swiss dealer (doubtless for far more than they could have bought the copy at auction), just in time for me to consult it before making my trip to Europe.

Using the facsimile for my final day and a half before boarding Eurostar was as useful as having the original manuscript, because a lot of essential but basic work (such as examining the iconography, mise-en-page, and text) does not require the original and can be done perfectly well from reproductions. But if reproductions are not available one must use the original. Access to the facsimile arguably saved me the cost (hotel, meals, etc.) of 36 hours in an expensive foreign city. When I did go to the foreign library I was able to use my time more profitably by being well-prepared: I benefited, and the manuscript benefited. Surely these are some of the functions that facsimiles are supposed to serve? And surely if every student of medieval manuscripts or medieval art history is going to be taught about key manuscripts such as the Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berri, the value of a copy of the facsimile for teaching/learning purposes far outweighs its financial cost?

Sloppy Thinking, Sloppily Reported

The Poet Laureate Andrew Motion has been reported and interviewed widely in the mass media recently. That in The Independent "US is stripping Britain of its literary treasures" is a typical example of the sloppy reporting that the story has produced:

While the world's billionaires were busy snapping up the work of Britain's leading artists for record prices earlier this month, the curators of the UK's museums and galleries could only look on and despair.

No. First, actually UK curators are working hard and having considerable success in acquiring material for UK collections; it is only the headline-grabbing mega-bucks items that regularly go beyond British acquisition budgets. It has always been a fact of life that no institution or individual can buy everything, and that some items will end up with another owner, possibly in another country.

Second, to compare the prices achieved recently for contemporary artwork by artists such as Francis Bacon and Damien Hurst, with literary manuscripts by writers such as "Tom Stoppard, Penelope Lively and Doris Lessing" is like comparing chalk and cheese.

Professor Motion said on Friday that it was important authors were paid for their work, but also important their work remained in the UK. "We should keep it here because it's ours," he said.

In what sense is it "ours"? If a British-born writer writes something while in the US, does that make it "theirs"? If an American-born and -bred writer with a British passport writes something while in Switzerland, whose is that?

"It makes complete sense to have Philip Larkin's work in Hull."

As long as the material is properly catalogued, preserved, made available to scholars, and made available for loan to other institutions, it really doesn't matter much where papers are kept. The only reason for keeping a body of material together is to make the life of the scholar/student more convenient, allowing him/her to do most of his work in one place. It is very rare that even a small percentage of a collection will be on display in an exhibition, so the rest of its may as well be in another country, as far as the exhibition visitor is concerned.

"There is nothing like holding a manuscript in your hand or looking at it through glass, seeing the revisions, imagining the hand across the page."

Let's take this apart:

The only people who are likely to hold a valuable literary manuscript in their hand are qualified students/scholars. For them London or New York is probably more convenient a place to do this than Hull, as they can study the material with the benefit of the other resources of a major research library.

The people who look at a manuscript in an exhibition case "though glass", should not care whether the manuscript is owned by a British, American, or Swiss collection: it makes no difference at all, except in a patriotic/sentimental/jingoistic way.

As for "imagining the hand across the page", exactly the same thing is true in a reproduction of a manuscript (as long as one does have an imagination) -- it does not have to be the original, unless one wants to treat the original as a sort of quasi-religious relic, imbued with special magic due to its having been in contact with the deity/celebrity that wrote it.

More on this general subject in due course ...

Troyes Iluminated MSS

Still no mention on the Troyes website of the exhibition of Troyes MSS that is rumoured to be happening this summer. I have emailed them to ask about the dates. Update to follow ...

While looking at their online exhibitions I found that they have a similar 'turning the pages' system as used for the Paris show (see below). For manuscripts such as their ms. 59, a Bible historiale, they have included a large number of consecutive leaves--the whole of Genesis, not just the pages with illumination--which is certainly preferable to the highly selective images that you get for most BL MSS. The two disadvantages I've found are that you have to wait for a large download to complete before you can start, and once you do have the virtual book open navigation is very limited: you have to leaf through the pages in sequence -- unlike a real book, you cannot jump to a particular page, skipping the ones in between. Still, so many institutions are now experimenting with similar technologies that they will doubtless improve, and it all looks very promising for the future.

UPDATE: the show wil run from 1 July to 30 September