A New Document on the Appearance of the Shroud of Turin from Nicole Oresme: Fighting False Relics and False Rumours in the Fourteenth Century

Abstract

For over a century, the debate surrounding the appearance of the Shroud of Turin has revolved around documents produced in Champagne in 1389–1390, when this now-controversial relic was already caught up in a polemic between supporters and detractors of its cult. This article is the result of the discovery of a new, older source: in a treatise on unexplained phenomena (mirabilia) dated between 1355–82, the Norman scholar Nicole Oresme (d. 1382) refers to the Shroud as a ‘patent’ example of clerical fraud, prompting him to be more broadly suspicious of the word of ecclesiastics. After showing how this new document sheds light on the case for the Shroud’s appearance in Lirey in Champagne, and confirming the thesis corroborated by other fourteenth-century sources that the Shroud is a medieval artifact, the article uses the example of the Shroud to interrogate the role assumed by scholars of the period as verifiers of dubious opinions, and the methods they used.