The RECEPTIO-Rossi Affair III: My "Vendetta"

Rossi has published another document on her Academia.edu page, in which she refers to my "unjustified vendetta" against her. I therefore take an opportunity to respond to her main points, using her own headings. If any readers think I have failed to respond adequately to any of the claims in her document, please let me know.

1. Swiss National Science Foundation

She states that I claim that she has "received or perhaps continue to receive astronomical amounts of money from the Swiss National Science Foundation".

I have merely added up the amounts as published on the Swiss National Science Foundation's website. If I have made a mathematical error, it was not deliberate; I invite readers to check for themselves. I will willingly make a correction to my blogpost and apologise if I have made a mistake.

She writes: "Your statements are frankly ridiculous, or better, they are fake news. You have not yet realised that no member of RECEPTIO receives any salary from the SNSF."

I have never suggested that any member of RECEPTIO receives a salary from the SNSF.

She writes: "you claimed that I even earned 20,ooo Swiss Francs with the De Roucy Book of Hours. The truth is that this money covered part of the Open Access publication, which cost the publishing house much more"

I stated that she received a grant for this amount, because that is what is says on the website of the Swiss National Science Foundation. I do not know how the money was spent, but I stand by my opinion that the publication is a shoddy piece of work.

2. Your attempt to discredit me in the newspapers and at the University of Zurich

I have not attempted to contact any journalists, but several have contacted me. I have not given any of them an interview.

I have contacted a few email addresses at the University of Zurich, simply inviting them to read my original blogpost.

3. The picture of Andrea Murchio

She writes: "I find it sleazy that it was noticed by you or an associate or alter ego of yours that the name of Andrea Murchio, who died on Friday of a heart attack before a tennis match, was still listed on our site."

I have made no mention of Murchio on Twitter, in my blogs, or anywhere else, although I did re-tweet a thread written by someone else, whom I do not know. They (I do not even know their gender) are not "an associate or alter ego" of mine.

She ends: "I think that after all the falsehoods you have published, you should bring the discussion back to the level of adult and educated people."

If she can give me an example of a single falsehood I have published, I would be very willing to address it.

I will respond to the second part of Prof. Rossi's document, headed "Response to Mr Kidd's accusations on his blog", separately.

"Nobody cares about your blog!"

[Edit, 26 Dec. 2022, 9am: For anyone reading this for the first time, please note that a lot happened yesterday (Christmas Day) on Twitter, with many people contributing new information and insights concerning RECEPTIO. I will try to update the blog below later today [Edit: I have now done this], and will also aim to write another blog to document the reflect new revelations]

The title of my blog today is a quotation from an email I received yesterday from Noemi De Santis of RECEPTIO, the Research Centre for European Philological Tradition (website here).

It comes at a very opportune moment, because this week marked the 10th anniversary of the week I started blogging fairly regularly: since December 2012 I have posted an average of about 45 blogs per year, and I was wondering how to mark this milestone. I hope that the following blog will provide some entertainment for the Christmas holidays!

Another Leaf from the MdM and AdM Hours Found

Regular readers will know that I have been trying to trace leaves from a late 15th-century Book of Hours with unusual initials "MdM" and "AdM" in some of the margins (see here, here, and here).

One that has so far eluded me was reproduced in Maggs Bros., Catalogue 437: Books of Art and Allied Subjects (1923), no. 1159 plate LXI (of which a detail is shown above):

A Breviary Written at Lucca in 1464

For a few years I have been aware of leaves of a Breviary (of which an example is shown above) which had a colophon with the name of the scribe, and the place and date of completion: Lucca on 22 December 1464. But searches for the terms Breviary, Lucca, and 1464 produce surprisingly few hits for institutional websites: most of the search results are for online dealer listings. I hope this blogpost will make the manuscript better known and lead to new identifications.