Author's Preface

Summary

Nine years ago, having reached my seventies, I retired from my threedecade- long writing career, moving with my wife to the leisure lifestyle of Australia's Sunshine Coast. My main plan was to pursue long-neglected art interests; however, because my first book had been on the so-called ‘Shroud of Turin’ – claimed as of Christ, but dated to the fourteenth century by a 1988 carbon dating test – I also intended a casual trawl through my collection of never-fully-explored documentation concerning Geoffroi de Charny (thought to have been the Shroud's first owner), just on the off-chance of coming across some hitherto overlooked clue to how he had acquired this enigmatic object.

A prime target was Charny's 1,934-line Livre poem, an untranslated transcript of which I possessed from a Ph.D. thesis of the 1970s, based on a late fourteenth-century Brussels manuscript that is widely understood to be the earliest surviving manuscript of Charny's writings. Back in 1992, whilst researching a biography of Shakespeare, I had chanced upon an intriguing manuscript containing this poem and Charny's Demandes (questions that he composed for France's very short-lived Company of the Star), that had become housed at Oxford's Bodleian Library. However, the manuscript was undated, and in 2011 my priority was simply a rudimentary translation of the poem in the hope of gaining some fresh insights on Charny's personality, even though I was fairly sure that it contained no reference to the Shroud. Hugh Duncan, a British-born teacher and local historian long domiciled in France, very kindly volunteered his help with this exercise, and in 2012, happening to visit Oxford, he called on the Bodleian Library in the hope of examining its Charny manuscript at first hand, as I had done twenty years before. Serendipitously his invigilator was Bodleian senior librarian Dr Bruce Barker-Benfield, who not having previously studied the manuscript for himself, became sufficiently intrigued by it that it sparked a lively international correspondence between the three of us.

Sometime earlier, Dr Mark Guscin, a professional translator domiciled in Spain, had remarked to me how helpful he had found the curators at Madrid's Biblioteca Nacional, prompting me to ask him if he might make some enquiries on my behalf concerning a Charny manuscript that had been reported at the Biblioteca back in the late nineteenth century, but which scholars had so far been unable to trace.