Does any study, dataset, or corpus count substantiate Kwakkel's 'one in seven' colophon-frequency figure?
claim-kwakkel-one-in-seven-colophon-figure-uncited-in-source-text rests on a direct read of Erik Kwakkel's 2014 blog post (both the medievalfragments original and the medievalbooks.nl repost), which states "about one in seven" scribes added a colophon without citing a corpus, dataset, or prior scholar's count. The fact that Kwakkel said this is Tier 1; the ratio itself, as a claim about a real population of manuscripts, is not yet checked against any independent count.
Why it matters. This figure is already circulating in the vault's own inbox history (the 2026-08-16 capture that first raised it, entity-colophon) attributed to Kwakkel as if it were a settled statistic. It may simply be an expert's calibrated estimate rather than a corpus-counted result — which is a legitimate but different kind of claim, and the vault should not blur the two.
What would answer it.
- A clean, searchable copy of Kwakkel's 2018 monograph Books Before Print (Arc Humanities Press) — the only excerpt found this session, the introduction PDF hosted by Árnastofnun (arnastofnun.is), extracted as corrupted glyphs and could not be searched; a Google Books preview or a better scan might restate the figure with added sourcing.
- J.P. Gumbert's "statistical codicology" work (Leiden, Kwakkel's doctoral lineage) — the most likely place a rigorous corpus count of Western Latin colophon frequency would live, if one exists; no direct link to this specific figure was found this session.
- The 2025 Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Nature) paper running a bibliometric/corpus analysis of colophons to estimate rates of female scribes (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04666-6) — a candidate model for what a traceable primary source for a colophon-frequency statistic looks like; not yet checked against Kwakkel's figure specifically.
Raised during promotion of
10-inbox/raw/2026-09-20-does-medieval-book-historian-erik-kwakkels-own-published.md.
Progress log
- 2026-09-21: Followed up on the three candidate leads named above. The 2025 Bergen bibliometric study (claim-ommundsen-2025-colophon-bibliometric-study-measures-female-scribe-attribution-not-frequency) was read directly end to end and measures a different quantity (female-scribe attribution within the colophon catalogue, not colophon frequency) and does not reference Kwakkel or Gumbert. A second, independent corpus-based colophon-frequency count was found and read — a Kiel University DFG project counting German-language manuscripts (claim-kiel-dahm-project-finds-one-in-five-colophon-frequency-in-german-manuscripts) — but for a different manuscript population and a different ratio (~1-in-5, not 1-in-7). A "15%" figure that circulates as if independent corroboration was traced to its own footnote and found to be Kwakkel's figure restated, not a second measurement (claim-purple-motes-15-percent-colophon-figure-restates-kwakkels-one-in-seven). Two access routes that could still resolve the figure's origin were attempted and failed on tooling grounds, not content grounds: Kwakkel's 2018 monograph Books Before Print (the only public excerpt, an Árnastofnun-hosted PDF, still decodes to unmapped glyphs on re-extraction) and Melissa Moreton's 2014 "Pious Voices" (academia.edu 403, Project MUSE served a bot-verification page, the related UIowa dissertation host failed TLS verification). Question stays open — partially narrowed (two plausible corpus analogs ruled out as direct matches) but not answered.
claude-sonnet-5 · raw markdown