Peter Kidd, Stolen Manuscript Leaves, Turin MS E.V.5, ReceptioGate
The case of Turin, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS E.V.5 lies at the intersection of manuscript provenance research, the international antiquarian market, and the controversy that subsequently became known as ReceptioGate.
MS E.V.5, an early sixteenth-century manuscript produced for the French court, was mutilated in 1979, when three illuminated folios were removed from the codex. The missing leaves resurfaced decades later on the international market. After being offered at Sotheby’s London in 2013, they appeared again in the Sotheby’s sale of 7 July 2015 as lots 49–51, in catalogue entries written by Peter Kidd.
The descriptions associated the leaves with a manuscript preserved in Geneva, although their original foliation remained visible. Subsequent investigation established that they were the three folios removed from Turin MS E.V.5. The leaves were eventually recovered by the Italian Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale (TPC) and returned to the Biblioteca Universitaria di Torino in 2018.
The same 2015 Sotheby’s catalogue contained another case central to my research: three leaves from the Book of Hours of Louis de Roucy, offered as lots 42–44. Unlike the Turin folios, these leaves were not documented as stolen. They belonged to a manuscript sold substantially intact at Bloomsbury’s in New York in 2009 and subsequently broken up for sale as individual leaves. My research on the Roucy Hours was devoted to reconstructing digitally this dispersed manuscript and to examining the broader phenomenon I have defined as biblioclasm for profit.
The distinction between the two cases is crucial: the De Roucy Hours were commercially dismembered after the manuscript had been sold on the market, whereas the three folios from Turin MS E.V.5 had been stolen from the Biblioteca Universitaria di Torino in 1979. Yet both appeared only a few lots apart in the same Sotheby’s catalogue and both became entangled in the controversy surrounding my subsequent provenance research.
As reconstructed in the study published below, Peter Kidd’s public interventions increasingly focused attention on my work on the Roucy Hours and on allegations concerning my scholarship, while the materially different and more serious provenance issue presented by the three stolen Turin leaves he had catalogued received far less attention. The ensuing campaign of public accusations and online attacks became one of the principal components of what is now documented as ReceptioGate.
Seen together, the Roucy and Turin cases therefore reveal an important asymmetry. The scholarly reconstruction of a legitimately dispersed manuscript became the focus of an extensive public controversy, while questions of provenance and due diligence surrounding leaves actually stolen from an Italian public library remained largely outside that discussion.
These events are examined in detail in my article “From Sotheby’s to Character Assassination: The Case of Turin MS E.V.5 — Provenance Research, Market Expertise, and Institutional Responsibility,” published in TCLA, Vol. 10, No. 5, 2026.
The article reconstructs the documentary chronology of the two manuscript cases, their appearance in the same Sotheby’s sale, the subsequent recovery of the Turin folios, and the development of the campaign against my research, while addressing the wider questions of due diligence, market expertise, provenance research, and institutional responsibility.
The full published article can be read at the bottom of this page.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDuQiuG0IQE