I have decided to read Ian Wilson's books on the Shroud of Turin in order, to see how his views have changed over time and how he has influenced the study of sindonolgy.

This is the fourth book, The Shroud, published in 2010. It follows 1978's The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ?, which set out his theory that the Shroud was the Mandylion or Image of Edessa; 1986's The Evidence of the Shroud, which added some evidence, but was mainly a pictorial redo of his first book; and 1998's Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence That the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real, which recapitulated his arguments and tackled the carbon-dating head on.

Though this is the most recent book, and a kind of update/redo of his 1978 book (p. viii), I think that the 1998 book Blood and the Shroud did a slightly better job of presenting the evidence, and the 1978 book had the best map of the Mandylion's/Shroud's travels (on the endpapers).

After a preface and introduction, Wilson's book contains twenty chapters followed by a postscript, a Shroud chronology, the references, and the index. Chapter 2 discusses various attempts to recreate the Shroud image or figure out how a medieval forger could have done it. Since we moderns can not even do it, Wilson contends a medieval forger did not make it either. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the medical evidence seen on the Shroud. Chapter 5 talks about the pollen and stuff stuck on the Shroud. Chapter 6 discusses the cloth, weave, and linen. Chapter 7 discusses the carbon-dating and the probable ways it could have been compromised or incorrect. These chapters contain some new and updated information, but he handles the evidence better and more thoroughly in Blood and the Shroud (1998). (De Wesselow's 2012 book The Sign: The Shroud of Turin and the Secret of the Resurrection summarizes the physical evidence for the Shroud's authenticity pretty good too in the first part of the book. De Wesselow goes off the rails, however, in the second part of the book.)

Chapters 8-18 recapitulate the history of the Mandylion (Wilson mostly uses "Image of Edessa" in this book) and the Shroud of Turin. In doing so, Wilson reiterates, again, his theory that the Mandylion and the Shroud were one and the same item. Like his previous books, he makes an elegant case. The newest evidence here is Barbara Frale's work on the Templars and Mark Guscin's work on the Sudarium of Oviedo and the Image of Edessa. Frale's Templar research (see her The Templars and the Shroud of Christ from 2012) seems to vindicate Wilson's 1978 contention that a Templar got it after the sack of Constantinople in 1204 and it passed to the knight Geoffry de Charny in the mid-1300s (Charny surely had Templar connections). Guscin's hypothesis is that the Sudarium of Oviedo was a facecloth put over Jesus's face that somehow got separated from the Shroud. He maintains that the bloodstains on the Sudarium match some of the bloodstains on the Shroud. These chapters are the best part of the book. Wilson's 1998 book dealt with this history backwards, from Shroud back to Mandylion; here he works forward in time, from Mandylion to Shroud.

Chapters 19 and 20 serve as a sort of summation. The chronology is updated with some new info, but the timeline was presented better in his 1978 and 1998 books. Here the genealogical tables and some black-and-white drawings are done quite well, though some from the 1998 book are better and not reproduced here. The color plates are good (though I wonder why he did not use the 13th century image "Surrender of the Mandylion to the Byzantines" [see File:Surrender of the Mandylion to the Byzantines.jpg on Wikipedia], which emphatically shows the Mandylion/Image of Edessa as a face on a more than body-length cloth like the Shroud). The endnotes are nice, but the bibliographic formatting, using only surnames, meant I often had to turn to the bibliography after turning to the note. A hassle. The index was in a super-small font size. A hassle.

I would heartily recommend this book, since it is the latest of Wilson's books on the subject, for anybody who wants to read a pro-Shroud work. Wilson is thorough, ecumenical, and fair-minded. He lays out the case for the Shroud of Turin's veracity better than anybody. ( )

Two decades after radiocarbon dating declared the Turin Shroud a mediaeval fake, brand-new historical discoveries strongly suggest that this famous cloth, with its extraordinary photographic imprint, is genuinely Christ's shroud after all.

In 1978 in his international bestseller The Turin Shroud Ian Wilson ignited worldwide public debate with his compelling case endorsing the shroud's authenticity. Now, 30 years later, he has completely rewritten and updated his earlier book to provide fresh evidence to support his original argument. Shroud boldly challenges the current post-radiocarbon dating view - that it is a fake. By arguing his case brilliantly and provocatively, Ian Wilson once more throws the matter into the public arena for further debate and controversy. ( )