Biblioclasm, Market, and Ethics: Stop Calling Them Fragments as Peter Kidd of MSSProvenance Does

The antiquarian market continues to legitimise the destruction of manuscripts by describing excised leaves as “fragments.” Yet this term, properly used, refers to the accidental survival of damaged or partial codices — not to leaves deliberately excised for sale. The difference is not linguistic. It is ethical, historical, and juridical.

This distinction is at the heart of several scholarly works by Prof. Carla Rossi, whose research has shown how codices of devotional and artistic value have been dismantled and dispersed under commercial logic. In The Book of Hours of Louis de Roucy (https://books.google.ch/books/about/The_Book_of_Hours_of_Louis_De_Roucy.html?id=oxDgEAAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y), Rossi reconstructs a dismembered manuscript once known as Courtanvaux Hours. She identifies the role of antiquarian Peter Kiefer in the physical dismemberment and the active involvement of Peter Kidd in the circulation and promotion of the leaves. The reconstruction is grounded in catalogue evidence, visual comparison, and auction tracking.

This approach is continued in Isabelle Boursier's Book of Hours, a Dismembered Manuscript from Mary Benson's Collection and in Digital Reconstruction of a Dismembered Book of Hours Illuminated by Robert Boyvin (Cambridge Scholars, 2024), where Rossi reassembles other dispersed manuscripts through systematic collation of images, codicological analysis, and dealer metadata. In both cases, the author refuses the term “fragment” — a linguistic choice that resists the normalisation of biblioclasm.

These publications do not merely reconstruct lost unity: they expose the structures of the market, the silence of institutions, and the complicity of intermediaries. In “Biblioclasm for Profit: The Fetish Market of Dismembered Manuscript Leaves” (Studj Romanzi, XVIII, 2022, pp. 161–183), Rossi provides a theoretical framework for this phenomenon, grounded in cultural history, ethics, and legal reflection.

As scholars and institutions, we must refuse the vocabulary of the market. These are not fragments. They are stolen leaves — and every euphemism used to describe them feeds a trade that profits from cultural destruction.