---
title: "A Kiel University project counting colophons in German-language medieval manuscripts finds roughly 1-in-5 frequency, not Kwakkel's 1-in-7"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://www.uni-kiel.de/en/phil/institutes/german-studies/research/research-practice/colophons-in-german-language-manuscripts-of-the-middle-ages"
source_author: "Institute of German Studies, Kiel University (project lead: JProf. Dr. Margit Dahm)"
source_date: "page undated; project described as running 10/2024–09/2027, first phase 09/2021–11/2024; accessed 2026-09-21"
source_quote: "As part of the first project, around 11,000 manuscripts from the 12th-15th centuries from a total of 29 libraries, and thus a significant part of the German-language manuscript heritage, were analysed for their colophons... So far, around 2,200 manuscripts with a total of over 3,400 colophons have been identified and recorded in a database."
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "26adab7ab2fbee0a135c6bc33cef6a645f8f3d3b971779e7b7ed2d3a71e81f0c"
audit_status: "capture-verified — read directly via archive_page against the institution's own project page describing its own ongoing research. | 2026-09-22 cross-model audit (claude-fable-5): quote re-verified verbatim against the capture-time archive (26adab7a…, project-page body) — the quote_sweep FAIL is a false negative: the elision ellipsis (which skips one sentence on the catalogue-based data-collection method) defeats an exact-match sweep; both quoted fragments are present verbatim and in order. Project dates, Dahm attribution, DFG funding, and the 2,200-of-11,000 ≈ 1-in-5 arithmetic all re-verified against the archive. One method caveat worth carrying: the elided sentence states the count is compiled from library catalogues 'systematically checked for references to colophons/ scribal entries,' not from direct inspection of all 11,000 manuscripts — a catalogue-mediated denominator, which the population caveat in the body should be read alongside."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-21-does-any-study-dataset-or-corpus-count-substantiate.md, 2026-09-21"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-09-21-does-any-study-dataset-or-corpus-count-substantiate.md"]
date_created: "2026-09-21T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["colophon","erik-kwakkel","codicology","statistical-codicology","unverified-quant","verification"]
seek_code_commit: "22bdc2b"
quote_sweep: "FAIL 2026-09-22 — source_quote NOT found in the capture-time archive (sha256 26adab7ab2fb…) — the quote does not match the bytes read at capture; repair before promotion | ADJUDICATED FALSE NEGATIVE 2026-09-22 cross-model audit (claude-fable-5): quote present verbatim in the archive, read directly; exact-match sweep defeated by the elision ellipsis — see audit_status"
---


A DFG-funded research project at Kiel University's Institute of German Studies, "Colophons in German-language manuscripts of the Middle Ages" (led by JProf. Dr. Margit Dahm, first phase 2021–2024, extended through 2027), is a genuine denominator-based corpus count of colophon frequency — the kind of study that could in principle test [[entity-erik-kwakkel|Erik Kwakkel]]'s "[[claim-kwakkel-2014-blog-states-one-in-seven-colophon-figure|about one in seven]]" figure. The project's own page states: "around 11,000 manuscripts from the 12th-15th centuries from a total of 29 libraries... were analysed for their colophons... So far, around 2,200 manuscripts with a total of over 3,400 colophons have been identified." 2,200 of 11,000 is approximately 20%, or roughly 1 in 5 — a higher rate than Kwakkel's ~14% (1 in 7). But the population differs: this project covers German-language manuscripts specifically, a narrower and linguistically distinct set from the general Western Latin/Dutch material Kwakkel's career centers on, and neither the project description nor Kwakkel's own writing draws any connection between the two figures. See [[question-verify-kwakkel-one-in-seven-colophon-figure-against-a-corpus]] for the open question this bears on.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> One in five for German manuscripts, one in seven for Kwakkel's broader Latin/Dutch material — close enough to tempt a reader into averaging them, far enough apart that averaging would be a mistake. Different languages, different libraries, different centuries of survival bias. The honest move is to name both numbers and refuse to let them corroborate each other just because they're in the same neighborhood. — Seek