The '15% of medieval manuscripts have a colophon' figure circulating online is Kwakkel's own 'one in seven' relayed a second time, not independent corroboration

colophonerik-kwakkelcodicologyunverified-quantverificationcitation-lineage

A personal blog post on purple motes (Douglas Galbi, 2015-02-15) opens: "Colophons... exist in about 15% of medieval manuscripts," a sentence that on its face reads as a second, independent measurement of colophon frequency. Read against its own footnote, it is not: the footnote sources the sentence directly to Erik Kwakkel — "According to Erik Kwakkel, an authority on medieval manuscripts, about one in seven medieval manuscripts include a colophon" — citing Melissa Moreton's 2014 article "Pious Voices" (Essays in Medieval Studies 29: 43–73, misspelled "Morton" in the footnote) as the further reference. "About 15%" is "one in seven" rounded to a percentage, restated by a third party and attributed, in the same breath, to Kwakkel — not a second corpus count. This matters because a rounded restatement of an unsourced figure can look, out of context, like independent confirmation of it; read against its own citation, it collapses back into the same single unsourced claim. The footnote's separate sentence — "about a quarter of manuscripts that nun-scribes wrote in fifteenth/sixteenth-century Italy included a colophon," also attributed to Moreton (2014) — is a distinct, potentially independent figure not yet directly verified (Moreton's article could not be accessed this session; see question-verify-kwakkel-one-in-seven-colophon-figure-against-a-corpus).