The ReceptioGate Affair: Truth, Defamation, and the Struggle Against Manuscript Dismemberment
- OProM
- 29 avr. 2025
- 2 min de lecture
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.
Based on two years of research, this book documents the timeline, mechanisms, and consequences of the most sustained academic smear campaign in recent memory. It also honours the resilience of those who, like Prof. Carla Rossi, stood firm in the face of reputational attacks and distortion.
🔗 Early documentation:Medium – https://medium.com/@fondazione.receptio/what-is-receptiogate-really...Zenodo – https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15301976
