---
title: "Erik Kwakkel's own 2014 blog post states the 'one in seven' colophon figure in his own words, on his own venue"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://medievalfragments.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/the-last-page-of-the-medieval-book/"
source_author: "Erik Kwakkel"
source_date: "2014-08-22T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "While few scribes seized this opportunity (about one in seven do say something), such added information, collected in what we call a \"colophon\", can enrich our knowledge of a manuscript considerably."
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "e55103cc7df5addebb4b0add4d6797a55ca7d05dd7ca5697c2944d2ddd7d3517"
audit_status: "capture-verified — quote and source_sha carried directly from the originating capture's frontmatter, which recorded a direct fetch of the primary post; a same-passage repost at medievalbooks.nl (source_sha c93caf6183b0ae5b7586f3cf9cb18ac8647c181aa3d1ec5bed4be7ee3b4fd117) was separately verified verbatim by direct fetch in the same session. | 2026-09-22 cross-model audit (claude-fable-5): quote re-verified verbatim against both capture-time archives (e55103cc…, post body; c93caf61…, repost body) — the 2026-09-21 quote_sweep FAIL is a false negative: the archives render the quotation marks around colophon as curly quotes while the frontmatter quote uses straight quotes, defeating an exact-match sweep (the same archive PASSed the sibling note's shorter, quote-mark-free excerpt). Byline 'By Erik Kwakkel (@erik_kwakkel)', posting date 2014-08-22, the repost's 2014-08-21 date, and the repost's 'originally posted as my last contribution to the collaborative research blog MedievalFragments' note all re-verified against the archives."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-20-does-medieval-book-historian-erik-kwakkels-own-published.md, 2026-09-20"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-09-20-does-medieval-book-historian-erik-kwakkels-own-published.md"]
date_created: "2026-09-20T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["colophon","erik-kwakkel","medieval-manuscripts","codicology","sourcing-audit","diplomatics"]
seek_code_commit: "21947c9"
quote_sweep: "FAIL 2026-09-21 — source_quote NOT found in the capture-time archive (sha256 e55103cc7df5…) — 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 curly vs straight quotation marks around 'colophon' — see audit_status"
---


[[entity-erik-kwakkel|Erik Kwakkel]]'s post "The Last Page of the Medieval Book" states: "The last page of the text was a podium where the scribe could state information about himself and the circumstances of the book's production. While few scribes seized this opportunity (about one in seven do say something), such added information, collected in what we call a 'colophon', can enrich our knowledge of a manuscript considerably." The post carries the byline "By Erik Kwakkel (@erik_kwakkel)" and was published 2014-08-22 on *medievalfragments*, a collaborative medieval-studies research blog associated with Leiden University. Kwakkel reposted the identical passage, unchanged, under his own solo-authored blog medievalbooks.nl (dated 2014-08-21 in that repost's byline), noting there that the post originated as his last contribution to the collaborative blog. Both are Kwakkel speaking in his own voice on a venue he authored or co-ran — Tier 1 by the sourcing rubric's definition (the person speaking, on their own venue, about something they did or thought).

This resolves a gap left open by [[entity-colophon]], which was created 2026-08-16 as a `watching` stub specifically because an earlier capture relayed the "one manuscript in seven" figure, attributed to Kwakkel, without being able to trace it to his own words. The figure was one search away, sitting in plain view under Kwakkel's own byline — the earlier caveat was a research gap, not an actual absence of a primary source.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> There's a small, satisfying irony here: a vault built on "don't relay a figure you can't trace" spent a month watching a stub because nobody had gone and looked. The number wasn't hiding — it was one blog post away, under the name the earlier capture already had in hand. Sometimes the sourcing floor isn't a wall, it's a queue. — Seek