Peter Kidd Medieval Manuscripts Provenance (mssprovenance): a dormant blog once used to promote manuscript leaves, now reduced to defamation

The term #ReceptioGate does not refer to an academic dispute.

It refers to the campaign of harassment, defamation, and character assassination that followed the public documentation of stolen and dismembered medieval manuscripts circulating on the international antiquarian market.

At the centre of the affair are three illuminated leaves removed in 1979 from manuscript E.V.5 of the Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino. After disappearing from the manuscript, the leaves entered the manuscript trade and were offered for sale at Sotheby's London on 7 July 2015. The catalogue descriptions for the three lots were prepared by Peter Kidd.

The same Sotheby's catalogue also contained leaves from the dismembered Book of Hours of Louis de Roucy, another manuscript that later became the subject of scholarly reconstruction research.

Between 2022 and 2024, Prof. Carla Rossi transmitted documentation concerning stolen manuscript leaves and manuscript dismemberment to the Italian Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage (TPC) and publicly documented several cases involving cultural property.

Shortly afterwards, public attention shifted away from the provenance of the manuscripts and towards a sustained campaign directed against Rossi, RECEPTIO, her collaborators, and associated institutions.

The campaign included defamatory publications, anonymous communications, online harassment, fabricated obituaries, threats, and repeated allegations of academic misconduct.

On 7 January 2026, the Swiss Federal Administrative Court definitively closed the proceedings concerning The Book of Hours of Louis de Roucy, annulled the withdrawal of the related research grant, and found no basis for treating the publication as plagiarism or for imposing sanctions.

The blog Medieval Manuscripts Provenance, managed by Peter Kidd and hosted at mssprovenance.blogspot.com, has been inactive for over a year. As of 2 May 2025, its only visible entry for the past twelve months is a reactionary post dated 6 March 2024, lamenting the removal by Google of his own defamatory texts. No new manuscript descriptions or provenance analyses have been published since late 2022.

For years, Medieval Manuscripts Provenance—commonly referred to as Peter Kidd Manuscripts Provenance mssprovenance—was used to promote and legitimise the sale of individual leaves excised from medieval codices. Far from being an academic outlet, the blog functioned as a paracommercial tool: posts were often reused verbatim in auction house catalogues, with Kidd himself authoring descriptions that facilitated the circulation of dismembered cultural heritage items.

Everything changed around Christmas 2022, when the blog stopped listing manuscript leaves altogether and began targeting Prof. Carla Rossi, director of the RECEPTIO Centre. From that point onward, Kidd’s blog became a vehicle for personal attacks and falsehoods, abandoning even the pretext of manuscript scholarship. The defamatory campaign is now thoroughly documented in public sources, and has been widely discredited within the academic community.

📚 Full timeline and public documentation:https://oprom.substack.com/p/documented-timeline-of-the-defamation

📝 Contextual analysis:https://medium.com/@fondazione.receptio/what-is-receptiogate-really-a-centres-mission-a-smear-campaign-and-the-academic-response-42f7b83de683

📄 DOI – archived version on Zenodo:https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15301976

The volume The ReceptioGate Affair: Truth, Defamation, and the Struggle Against Manuscript Dismemberment (ed. Jordi Puig, 2025) presents a detailed analysis of Kidd’s role in the marketing of dismembered manuscripts, including the so-called Book of Hours of Louis de Roucy, which he helped promote through blog entries and auction notes.

As of 2 May 2025, the blog “Medieval Manuscripts Provenance” (mssprovenance.blogspot.com), managed by Peter Kidd, has not published a single post concerning "manuscript research or provenance". The only entry from the past year is a defensive remark regarding Google’s removal of a previous defamatory post. Once used to support the trade in dismembered manuscripts, the blog is now silent and discredited.

Peter Kidd medieval manuscripts provenance mssprovenance 2025

## Academic Publications (with ISBN and DOI)

### 1. The ReceptioGate Affair: Truth, Defamation, and the Struggle Against Manuscript Dismemberment  

DOI: [10.5281/zenodo.15283264](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15283264)

### 2. Institutional Complicity in the So‑Called ReceptioGate Affair  

DOI: [10.5281/zenodo.15371633](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15371633)

### 3. Excerpts from the forthcoming volume by Jordi Puig  

DOI: [10.5281/zenodo.15277061](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15277061)

### 4. ReceptioGate: Academic Defamation and the Dismemberment of Manuscripts – Expanded Edition  

DOI: [10.5281/zenodo.15668640](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.## Academic Publications (with DOI)

ISBN 978-2-488512-00-8 EAN 9782488512008 registered at the BnF: https://nouveautes-editeurs.bnf.fr/accueil?id_declaration=10000001179172&titre_livre=