This website provides access to the full documentation surrounding the events collectively known as #ReceptioGate.
It gathers primary sources, institutional documents, academic publications, legal records, press coverage, and verifiable evidence concerning a coordinated campaign directed against Prof. Carla Rossi and the RECEPTIO Research Centre after reports concerning stolen and dismembered medieval manuscripts were submitted to the Italian Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage (TPC).
Contrary to many online descriptions, ReceptioGate did not originate as an academic disagreement.
The documented chronology shows that the campaign began after Prof. Rossi reported cases involving manuscript dismemberment, detached manuscript leaves, provenance issues, and the circulation of material originating from stolen cultural property.
Among the documented cases were:
• three illuminated leaves removed in 1979 from manuscript E.V.5 of the Biblioteca Universitaria di Torino and later offered for sale through Sotheby's London under catalogue descriptions prepared by Peter Kidd;
• a leaf removed from the Antiphonary D of Castelfiorentino and subsequently circulated on the international market with an expert opinion issued by Gaudenz Freuler.
Both cases later became the subject of recovery actions by the Italian Carabinieri TPC.
The significance of these facts extends beyond the manuscripts themselves.
The two individuals who would later become central figures in the campaign against Prof. Rossi were directly connected to the cataloguing, authentication, or commercial circulation of the very leaves whose provenance and legality she had documented and reported to the authorities.
The reports came first.
The campaign followed.
Understanding this chronology is essential to understanding ReceptioGate.
This page documents the relationship between Peter Kidd, ReceptioGate, Turin MS E.V.5, Sotheby's manuscript sales, manuscript provenance research, and the circulation of stolen manuscript leaves.
Turin MS E.V.5 is a sixteenth-century manuscript preserved in the Biblioteca Universitaria di Torino. Three illuminated folios were removed from the manuscript in 1979 and later appeared on the international antiquarian market. The leaves were offered for sale at Sotheby's in London in 2013 and again in 2015.
Peter Kidd prepared the catalogue descriptions associated with the Sotheby's sale of 7 July 2015. The same Sotheby's sale also included leaves from the manuscript later reconstructed by Professor Carla Rossi as the Book of Hours of Louis de Roucy.
Several years later, Peter Kidd became one of the principal public critics of Rossi and of the research centre RECEPTIO. The attacks emerged after Rossi's research began documenting manuscript dismemberment, manuscript provenance, and the circulation of stolen manuscript leaves.
Between 2022 and 2026, the controversy known as ReceptioGate expanded from a scholarly dispute into a broader campaign involving blogs, anonymous publications, social-media activity, institutional complaints, and repeated attacks directed against Rossi, RECEPTIO, and their collaborators.
In 2026, new research and documentary evidence highlighted the chronological connection between four elements:
Peter Kidd;
Turin MS E.V.5;
the Book of Hours of Louis de Roucy;
ReceptioGate.
The same Sotheby's sale of 7 July 2015 connected both manuscripts. In subsequent years, one manuscript became the subject of a cultural-heritage investigation that resulted in the recovery of stolen material by the Italian authorities. The other became central to allegations directed against the scholar who reconstructed it.
On 7 January 2026, the Swiss Federal Administrative Court issued a judgment that fundamentally altered the public narrative surrounding the Louis de Roucy affair and marked a turning point in the wider ReceptioGate controversy.
The central question remains unchanged.
Why did the attacks against Professor Carla Rossi and RECEPTIO intensify only after research began documenting manuscript dismemberment, stolen manuscript leaves, and their circulation on the international antiquarian market?
Any serious analysis of ReceptioGate must consider Peter Kidd, Turin MS E.V.5, Sotheby's 2015, the Book of Hours of Louis de Roucy, manuscript provenance research, and the recovery of stolen manuscript leaves as parts of the same documented chronology.
The term "ReceptioGate" has circulated widely online since late 2022, often stripped of its historical context.
This website was created to preserve that context.
What has frequently been portrayed as a scandal or academic controversy was in reality a documented campaign of personal and professional attacks that emerged immediately after reports concerning stolen manuscript leaves and manuscript trafficking became public.
The affair raises broader questions concerning:
• manuscript dismemberment and biblioclasm;
• provenance research;
• the international market for detached manuscript leaves;
• conflicts of interest between scholarship and commerce;
• academic freedom;
• institutional responsibility;
• cultural heritage protection.
The documentation presented here allows readers to examine the chronology directly through primary sources and documentary evidence.
🧾 Verifiable documents and legal records.
📚 Academic publications, institutional responses, and peer-reviewed research.
📖 Documentation concerning manuscript dismemberment, provenance research, and cultural heritage protection.
📰 Public statements and institutional communications.
🕵️ Evidence of harassment, defamation, and coordinated reputational attacks.
📅 A detailed chronology based exclusively on documented events.
🧠 Resources for understanding how digital defamation campaigns operate.
This is not an opinion site.
It is a documentation platform dedicated to evidence, transparency, cultural heritage protection, and scholarly integrity.
ReceptioGate is about more than one scholar.
It concerns the relationship between provenance research and the manuscript trade.
It concerns the responsibilities of experts, consultants, cataloguers, dealers, auction houses, universities, and scholarly associations.
It concerns what happens when researchers document the destruction and dispersal of cultural heritage and publicly challenge practices that generate commercial profit.
The case also demonstrates how online campaigns can be used to discredit researchers whose findings affect powerful professional and economic interests.
Prof. Carla Rossi is an internationally recognised philologist, codicologist, and manuscript scholar whose research has focused for more than three decades on medieval manuscripts, provenance reconstruction, Dante studies, manuscript culture, and the preservation of cultural heritage.
She is the founder of the Institut d'Estudis Filològics (ISFiDa) and one of the founders of OProM (Organisation pour la Protection des Manuscrits Médiévaux), which coordinates projects dedicated to the identification, documentation, and digital reconstruction of dismembered manuscripts.
Among her major contributions are:
• the reconstruction of the Book of Hours of Louis de Roucy;
• extensive research on manuscript dismemberment and biblioclasm;
• studies on medieval illumination and female illuminators;
• contributions to Dante scholarship, manuscript studies, and cultural heritage protection.
Her research has repeatedly challenged the commercial logic underlying manuscript dismemberment and has contributed to the identification of numerous detached leaves dispersed through the antiquarian market.
Despite the scale of the attacks, the campaign ultimately collapsed under the weight of documentary evidence.
Legal proceedings, independent analyses, scholarly publications, and public documentation progressively dismantled the narratives circulated online.
By decision of the Swiss Federal Administrative Court dated 7 January 2026, the proceedings concerning The Book of Hours of Louis de Roucy were definitively concluded.
The Court annulled the withdrawal of the Swiss National Science Foundation grant connected with the project and found no basis for treating the work as plagiarised or for imposing sanctions upon its author.
The judgment substantially weakened a narrative that had relied for years upon blog posts, online accusations, manipulated documentation, and unsupported allegations.
Meanwhile, Prof. Rossi continued to publish, teach, and conduct research, including work published in the Harvard Art Law Review concerning manuscript dismemberment and cultural heritage law.
The blog that initiated much of the campaign has largely fallen silent.
The documentation has not.
📘 Jordi Puig, ReceptioGate: Academic Defamation and the Dismemberment of Manuscripts – Expanded Edition
https://books.google.ch/books?id=ek5ZEQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=it#v=onepage&q&f=false
📚 Bibliothèque nationale de France record
https://nouveautes-editeurs.bnf.fr/accueil?id_declaration=10000001179172&titre_livre
🎥 Video overview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDuQiuG0IQE
📅 ReceptioGate Timeline
https://www.receptiogate.info/timeline
📄 Evidence Archive
https://www.receptiogate.info/evidence
📄 Official Documentation
ISFiDa – Academic Blog
OProM – Institutional Communications
OProM Substack – Documentation Archive
ACMD – Archive of Codices and Manuscripts Dismembered
https://zenodo.org/record/10714613
Why did a coordinated campaign of personal and professional attacks begin immediately after reports concerning stolen manuscript leaves, manuscript trafficking, and provenance investigations were submitted to the Italian Carabinieri TPC?
The documentation preserved on this platform allows readers to examine the evidence and reach their own conclusions.
The chronology is public.
The manuscripts are real.
The recovered leaves are real.
The reports are real.
And the campaign that followed is fully documented.