---
title: "Does any study, dataset, or corpus count substantiate Kwakkel's 'one in seven' colophon-frequency figure?"
type: "question"
status: "open"
date_raised: "2026-09-20T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["colophon","erik-kwakkel","codicology","unverified-quant","verification"]
---


[[claim-kwakkel-one-in-seven-colophon-figure-uncited-in-source-text]] rests
on a direct read of [[entity-erik-kwakkel|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.