The documented history of the cloth begins in the 1350s at Lirey in France, where it was displayed by the family of the knight Geoffroi de Charny. Within a generation the bishop of Troyes reported to the Avignon pope that a local artist had confessed to making it, and it was allowed only as a representation. In 1453 it passed to the Dukes of Savoy, who kept it at Chambery, where a fire in 1532 scorched the folded cloth and left symmetrical burn and water stains later patched by nuns. The Savoys moved their capital to Turin in 1578 and brought the relic with them. It survived a second fire in 1997. In 1983 the last Savoy heir left it to the Holy See, and the Archbishop of Turin serves as its appointed keeper under the Pope as Pontifical Custodian. Public expositions are infrequent and draw very large crowds.
Geoffroi de Charny, the knight who first publicly displayed the cloth at Lirey around 1354, died at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, and it was his widow, Jeanne de Vergy, who continued the expositions that drew the attention of Bishop Pierre d'Arcis, whose 1389 memorandum to the Avignon pope Clement VII is the source for the claim that an earlier bishop had identified the artist responsible; no corroborating record survives independently of d'Arcis's letter, written decades after the events it describes amid a dispute over the shrine's revenues. Clement VII's ruling permitted continued display but required it be presented as a representation rather than the authentic burial cloth. The 1532 Chambery fire, survived folded inside a silver reliquary, burned through multiple folded layers, producing the paired scorch marks visible today, and Poor Clare nuns patched the damage the following year with triangular cloth inserts still visible on the Shroud.