John writes:
A modest inquiry
I am working on a manuscript, the working title of which begins: The Coming of the Quantum Christ. One of the problems that I have, (and I think others may have) is the vast amount of literature on the Shroud and the concern that one does not want to be constantly rediscovering the wheel. On the otherhand, there have been a couple of times when I have come across things that I would have thought were well known or available and it turned out the they weren’t.
One example is that I thought it worthwhile to dig out a copy of Fr. Rinaldi’s original Sign article on the Shroud and found it tucked away in a Sign archive in Pennsylvania. Barrie then posted it on Shroud.com because it was a interesting historical artifact.
Recently, the issue has been cotton. There were references to cotton in the Shroud that predated the 1988 carbon testing that are often cited, particularly one by Raes. Buried in the 1989 publication of the carbon dating results in Nature by the carbon dating scientist was a was the following “thank” [sic]:
“Oxford thank [sic] P. H. South (Precision Process (Textiles) Ltd, Derby) for examining and identifying the cotton found on the shroud sample;”
I am not the only person to have noted the significance of the 1990 BSTS newsletter item discussed an article Precision’s South as the nature of what they found.
My query is this: Between 1990 when the BSTS published an article quoting South and 1999, when Benford and Marino published reported their findings (and reoprted them in 2000 at Orvieto, Italy) had anybody else published on the presence of cotton and the Shroud and its implications for carbon dating ?
If you would rather not comment publicly, you can E-Mail me at klotzlaw@gmail.com
PS: If Oxford assumes as a matter of course an editorial “we” I apologize for my “[sic]”. Also, as the uncrowned “king” of typos, who am I to “sic” Oxford?
“Oxford thank”do not sound right.
Any help for John?
There is a lot of background material in Maureen Fennell Mazzaoui’s The Italian Cotton Industry in the Later Middle Ages 1100-1600, Cambridge University Press, 1981. She makes the point, p. 80, that cotton and linen fibres were never woven together to make yarn but separate linen and cotton threads were used in a variety of cloths (detailed pp.166-7). Also there were times when the linen and cotton weavers formed a common guild. The book is valuable in that it takes the story back much earlier -to Roman times (Chapter One). Despite there being no reference to the Shroud there might be material here that is relevant to your researches.
Charles,
Thank you for your suggestion. I’ll see if I can locate it.