March 12, 2023

Humbert II de Viennois (1312 - 22 May 1355).

In December 2022, Karlheinz Dietz and I submitted a short paper to the newsletter of the British Society for the Turin Shroud (BSTS) answering critics of M. Ian Wilson regarding a paper we had published in the summer 2021 newsletter titled The accidental arrival of the Shroud at Lirey. The short paper, which the new editor Michael Kowalski decided to show to M. Wilson, was rejected because supposedly it repeated arguments and contained "quite personal criticisms about his [Wilson] work". That statement is quite incorrect because there are no "personal criticisms" in that short paper, which the reader can verify from the copy at ResearchGate (see below), and the short paper pointed out new essential errors written by M. Wilson. The short paper does indeed criticize the work of M. Wilson, but they are not "personal". We concluded that M. Wilson is not interested in detailed scholarly discussion and that the BSTS newsletter is not a venue for in-depth scholarly discussion on the Shroud.

We have made available this short response to Wilson's critics at ResearchGate A response to Ian Wilson's comments on the Sainte-Chapelle thesis. We hope you will find it instructive, in particular of this special gift looking like a large folded cloth that King John II gave to Humbert II de Viennois (the old Dauphin), in January 1352, and that Geoffroy de Charny was made a witness. We stated the following hypothesis: could that be the Shroud, which by some fortuitous circumstances became the property of Geoffroy instead of Humbert II?