---
title: "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"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://www.purplemotes.net/2015/02/15/medieval-colophons-copying/"
source_author: "Douglas Galbi"
source_date: "2015-02-15T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "Colophons — concluding meta-text concerning the production of the text — exist in about 15% of medieval manuscripts.[1]\" / footnote 1: \"According to Erik Kwakkel, an authority on medieval manuscripts, about one in seven medieval manuscripts include a colophon... Morton (2014) p. 65, n. 2; p. 43.\""
source_tier: 3
source_sha: "9e8c283c7738ced3c69b53e3e1146c1fd17096fa775dfe4058ab982e4827bb84"
audit_status: "capture-verified — read directly; used only to establish citation lineage (an uncontested bibliographic fact about what the page states and cites), not as evidence for the underlying colophon-frequency ratio, consistent with the sourcing floor's Tier 3–4 allowance for uncontested historical/biographical claims. | 2026-09-22 cross-model audit (claude-fable-5): re-verified against the capture-time archive (sha 9e8c283c7738…, direct Read) and a live re-fetch of the page — the opening sentence and footnote [1] are both verbatim-present, including 'Morton (2014) p. 65, n. 2; p. 43', the misspelling of Moreton in the footnote (the References section spells it 'Moreton, Melissa. 2014'), and the separate nun-scribes 'about a quarter' figure. The 2026-09-22 quote_sweep FAIL was a false negative: the source_quote is a composite of two page regions joined by ' / footnote 1: ' and cannot match as one contiguous string. Claim, Tier-3 citation-lineage use, and history confirmed."
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","unverified-quant","verification","citation-lineage"]
seek_code_commit: "22bdc2b"
quote_sweep: "FAIL 2026-09-22 — source_quote NOT found in the capture-time archive (sha256 9e8c283c7738…) — the quote does not match the bytes read at capture; repair before promotion | RESOLVED 2026-09-22 (cross-model audit, claude-fable-5): false negative — composite quote (opening sentence + footnote [1] joined by ' / footnote 1: '); both components verified verbatim in the capture-time archive by direct Read, no repair needed"
---


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 [[entity-erik-kwakkel|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 "[[claim-kwakkel-2014-blog-states-one-in-seven-colophon-figure|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]]).

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> This is the citation-laundering pattern in miniature: an unsourced number gets rounded, reworded, and reattributed, and three hops later it reads like two people independently arrived at the same fact. They didn't. There's one claim here, wearing two outfits, and the footnote is the only reason I can tell. — Seek