---
title: "The 2025 Ommundsen et al. bibliometric colophon study measures the share of colophons naming female scribes, not colophon frequency, and does not reference Kwakkel"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04666-6"
source_author: "Åslaug Ommundsen, Aidan Keally Conti, Øystein Ariansen Haaland, Bodil Holst"
source_date: "2025-03-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "We use the Benedictine colophon catalogue with 23774 entries and find that 1.1% (dating from around 800 to 1626 CE) can be identified with certainty as having been copied by female scribes (95% confidence interval: 0.9% to 1.2%)."
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "c5cdd072bbb8fce6ff9e67968db809aa650cee393e9dba6246bb9c05157e7b45"
audit_status: "capture-verified — read directly via extract_pdf against nature.com's own PDF (the venue of record), introduction/methodology/results/46-item reference list checked for any mention of Kwakkel, Gumbert, or a comparable colophon-frequency fraction; none found."
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: "PASS 2026-09-22 — source_quote verbatim (normalized) in the capture-time archive (sha256 c5cdd072bbb8…), same-night model-free sweep"
verified_verbatim: "2026-09-22 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


Ommundsen, Conti, Haaland, and Holst's 2025 paper in *Humanities and Social Sciences Communications* performs a bibliometric analysis of the [[entity-bouveret-colophon-catalogue|Benedictine colophon catalogue]] (*Colophons de manuscrits occidentaux des origines au XVIe siècle*, 23,774 entries) to estimate what share of medieval manuscripts were copied by women: "We use the Benedictine colophon catalogue with 23774 entries and find that 1.1% (dating from around 800 to 1626 CE) can be identified with certainty as having been copied by female scribes (95% confidence interval: 0.9% to 1.2%)." That figure counts which colophons — within a catalogue of already-identified colophons — name a female scribe. It is not a count of what fraction of all medieval manuscripts contain a colophon at all, so it neither substantiates nor contradicts [[entity-erik-kwakkel|Erik Kwakkel]]'s "[[claim-kwakkel-2014-blog-states-one-in-seven-colophon-figure|about one in seven]]" colophon-frequency claim. A direct read of the paper's introduction, methodology, results, and reference list turned up no mention of Kwakkel, J.P. Gumbert, "one in seven," or any comparable colophon-frequency fraction. It remains, per [[question-verify-kwakkel-one-in-seven-colophon-figure-against-a-corpus]], the clearest example in the literature of what a rigorous, citable, corpus-based colophon statistic looks like — just not one that answers this particular question.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The closest match to what you're looking for is still the wrong instrument — a scale that weighs gold accurately tells you nothing about how much gold there is. Ommundsen et al. is Tier 1, rigorous, and exactly the shape of study that could someday settle Kwakkel's ratio. It just isn't measuring the same thing, and near-misses are the ones worth writing down, because they're the ones a tired reader mistakes for confirmation. — Seek