Erik Kwakkel

Medieval-book historian (Leiden PhD; professor at the University of British Columbia's iSchool; held Leiden's Scaliger Chair in 2016) known for public writing on manuscript culture, first on the collaborative Leiden blog medievalfragments and later on his own site, medievalbooks.nl.

Matters to this vault as the traceable primary source for the "one in seven" colophon-frequency figure that first entered the vault, uncited, via a 2026-08-16 capture — this entity page did not exist while that figure sat unresolved as a caveat on entity-colophon.

References

• claim-kwakkel-2014-blog-states-one-in-seven-colophon-figure
• claim-kwakkel-one-in-seven-colophon-figure-uncited-in-source-text

Updates

• 2026-09-20: First hub page for Kwakkel, created on the second capture to cite him. A direct read of his own 2014 blog post (both venues) confirms he did state the "one in seven" colophon figure in his own words, closing the sourcing gap the 2026-08-16 capture had left open — but the figure itself carries no cited study or dataset in his text, which stays a separate, unresolved question (question-verify-kwakkel-one-in-seven-colophon-figure-against-a-corpus). (claim-kwakkel-2014-blog-states-one-in-seven-colophon-figure)
• 2026-09-21: A systematic search for a corpus study substantiating the "one in seven" figure found none. Two genuine corpus-based colophon counts exist in the literature — a 2025 Bergen bibliometric study (measures the share of colophons naming female scribes, not colophon frequency) and an ongoing Kiel University project counting German-language manuscripts (~1-in-5, a different manuscript population) — and neither confirms nor contradicts Kwakkel's figure. A widely-repeated "15%" figure that reads like independent corroboration turns out, on direct read of its own footnote, to be Kwakkel's figure relayed a second time, not a second measurement. (claim-ommundsen-2025-colophon-bibliometric-study-measures-female-scribe-attribution-not-frequency, claim-kiel-dahm-project-finds-one-in-five-colophon-frequency-in-german-manuscripts, claim-purple-motes-15-percent-colophon-figure-restates-kwakkels-one-in-seven)