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Prof.ssa Carla Rossi – Direttrice scientifica dell’ISFiDa, vittima di una violenta campagna diffamatoria via social dopo la denuncia al TPC di una lobby di mercanti biblioclasti

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Carla Rossi, Direttrice scientifica dell’ISFiDa, ha fondato nel 2016 la rivista internazionale Theory and Criticism of Literature and Arts e coordina da oltre trent’anni progetti di ricerca dedicati alla cultura scritta e alla trasmissione dei testi medievali, con particolare attenzione alla produzione libraria femminile e alla biblioclastia.

Ha denunciato al TPC il coinvolgimento di Peter Kidd nella ricettazione di tre fogli rubati dal ms della Biblioteca Universitaria di Torino segnato E.V.5 e per questo ha subito una durissima ritorsione (con diffamazione, persecuzione e minacce di morte per quattro anni) da questo consulente free-lance di case d'asta e gallerie d'arte.

Rossi per ISFiDa ha ideato e diretto progetti sulla presenza femminile nell’opera dantesca, promuovendo eventi e convegni interdisciplinari come:
- Dante e l’economia (Lugano, 2021)
- L’irradiazione dell'opera di Dante (Lugano, 2023)
- L'Androginia nella Commedia (Lugano, 2024)

- Una Terzina/Un'immagine (Barcellona, 2026)

 

Pubblicazioni recenti (2026 - libri):

https://ethicspress.com/products/beyond-the-margins

https://edizioni.libreriauniversitaria.it/libro/oltre-i-margini/

https://edizioni.libreriauniversitaria.it/libro/medioevo-fluido/

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/search?contributorName=Carla%20Rossi&contributorRole=author&redirectFromPDP=true&context=ubx

https://edizioni.libreriauniversitaria.it/libro/oltre-i-margini/

 

Volumi di Rossi presso la Library of Congress: 

https://search.catalog.loc.gov/search?option=author&pageNumber=1&query=Rossi%20Bellotto%2C%20Carla&recordsPerPage=25

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Profilo accademico, ORCID 0000-0001-6557-3684

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Carla Rossi, filologa romanza e storica dell’arte, è attiva in ambito accademico dagli anni Novanta. Abilitata all’insegnamento universitario in prima fascia delle letterature francesi medievali (d’oc e d’oïl), della letteratura italiana medievale e rinascimentale, ha concentrato la sua attività sulla filologia italiana, antico-francese e latina, con particolare attenzione ai manoscritti medievali, alla loro trasmissione, conservazione e ricostruzione digitale in caso di smembramenti.

I suoi interessi spaziano dalle edizioni critiche di testi medievali in latino, antico-francese e volgare italiano, agli studi su Marie de France, sul milieu intellettuale attorno a Thomas Becket, su Alain de Lille, Chrétien de Troyes, Dante Alighieri e Agnolo Bronzino.

Negli ultimi anni, ha aperto nuove prospettive di ricerca sul contributo femminile alla produzione libraria, con particolare attenzione alle miniatrici medievali e rinascimentali, al canone iconografico femminile e alla storia della ricezione. Il volume "Beyond the Margins. Female Illuminators in Medieval and Renaissance Europe" (Ethics International Press, 2025) è tra i primi studi sistematici sull’argomento. Ha inoltre curato commentari a edizioni facsimilari di manoscritti miniati, conducendo indagini archiviste e filologiche sui singoli codici.

Dal 1996 lavora sul manoscritto Royal 16 E VIII del British Museum, trafugato nel 1879. L’indagine, tradotta in più lingue tra cui il giapponese (dall'inglese "A Clue to the Fate of Royal 16 E VIII", Università di Hiroshima), ha portato nel 2024 alla pubblicazione del volume "The 1879 Theft of Royal Ms 16 E VIII from the British Museum" (Cambridge Scholars Publishing).

È fondatrice e direttrice dell’ISFiDa, caporedattrice di "Theory and Criticism of Literature and Arts" e membro onorario dell’OProM (Organisation pour la Protection des Manuscrits Médiévaux, Parigi).

Nel 2006 ha avviato il progetto “Biblioclasm & Digital Reconstruction”, con l’obiettivo di documentare e ricostruire digitalmente oltre 500 manoscritti smembrati. Insegna filologia romanza e ricostruzione codicologica in varie università europee, e co-dirige la collana "Biblioclasm and Digital Reconstructions" (Cambridge Scholars Publishing).

Collabora come traduttrice dal tedesco (tra cui Sellerio, per l’opera di Károly Kerényi) e come mediatrice culturale con Alef Yayinevi di Istanbul. Dal 2023 è impegnata in progetti interculturali con studiosi e artisti in Turchia e Israele (tra cui Moran Magal e Kobi Farhi).

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Come alto riconoscimento del suo impegno scientifico, il 19 dicembre 2025 lo Scriptorium Foroiuliense ha donato al Presidente della Repubblica Italiana Sergio Mattarella la copia facsimilare del Ms198 con il commentario curato dalla Prof.ssa Carla Rossi. Nello studio di accompagnamento al facsimile vengono identificati per la prima volta in assoluto la bottega di produzione del piccolo libro d'ore e il possibile destinatario. Rossi ha scoperto che il manoscritto è stato prodotto a Firenze nella bottega di Boccardino il Vecchio.

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Tra il 2023 e il 2026 ha pubblicato numerosi studi sulla filologia materiale e la storia culturale del libro, affrontando anche i temi della responsabilità scientifica e della trasparenza metodologica. È ora disponibile con DOI il suo profilo accademico ufficiale, corredato da documentazione di chiarimento rispetto alla violentissima diffamazione e persecuzione, con minacce di morte e di violenza fisica, subìta dopo una sua denuncia di mercanti biblioclasti al TPC in Italia tra il 2022 e il 2024:

🔗 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15248850. Jordi Puig ha dedicato più studi al caso della violenta campagna di odio contro di lei, orchestrata da mercanti d'arte da lei denunciati e accompagnata da gravi minacce di morte (circostanze che hanno poi dato luogo a due procedimenti giudiziari).

 

Si vedano:

 The ReceptioGate Affair 2026 New Evidence on Peter Kidd, the Sotheby’s Sale of Stolen Leaves from Turin MS E.V.5, and the Defamation Campaign that Followed

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- "The ReceptioGate Affair: Truth, Defamation, and the Struggle Against Manuscript Dismemberment", è disponibile in Open Accesso al seguente link

https://books.google.ch/books?id=ek5ZEQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=it#v=onepage&q&f=false

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- Receptiogate. Diffamazione accademica e smembramento di manoscritti medievali

https://books.google.ch/books?id=sB1oEQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=it#v=onepage&q&f=false

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Carla Rossi is a Romance philologist, codicologist, palaeographer, and art historian specialising in medieval and Renaissance manuscript culture. She taught Romance Philology at the University of Zurich from 2010 to 2025 and is currently Scientific Director of the Organisation pour la Protection des Manuscrits Médiévaux (OProM) and Director of the Institut d’Estudis Filològics Dantescs i Digitals Avançats (ISFiDA) in Barcelona.

For more than thirty years, her research has focused on textual transmission, illuminated manuscripts, the material history of the book, women’s participation in manuscript production, provenance research, profit-driven biblioclasm, and the digital reconstruction of dismembered codices.

Her method combines philology, codicology, palaeography, archival research, art-historical analysis, provenance documentation, and digital humanities. Rather than treating detached leaves as autonomous art objects, she reconstructs their textual, material, historical, and iconographic relationships with the manuscripts from which they were removed.

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The Archivum Codicum Manuscriptorum Disiectorum

Carla Rossi is the creator of the Archivum Codicum Manuscriptorum Disiectorum (ACMD), a research database developed over three decades and now maintained by the OProM.

The ACMD documents more than two hundred dismembered Western manuscripts. Its records bring together codicological data, textual contents, illumination, provenance, auction history, present locations, and proposed relationships among dispersed leaves. It provides the documentary foundation for the identification and digital reconstruction of manuscripts whose constituent parts are now held in different public and private collections.

The database is not simply an inventory of isolated objects. It was conceived as an instrument for restoring the historical intelligibility of dismantled books and for documenting the commercial mechanisms through which their leaves have circulated.

Turin MS E.V.5: provenance research and cultural heritage protection

One of the cases that shaped Rossi’s research and led to the creation of the OProM concerns MS E.V.5 of the Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino.

Three illuminated folios were cut from and stolen from the manuscript in 1979. Photographs of the missing leaves were published by the Comando Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale in 1982. The folios resurfaced decades later at Sotheby’s in London, where they were offered for sale in 2013 and again in 2015.

The catalogue descriptions for the 2015 sale were prepared by Peter Kidd. Although they correctly identified the texts of Raoul Bollart and their historical and artistic context, they did not recognise the leaves as the missing folios of the Turin manuscript. The original foliation remained visible, the textual contents corresponded to lacunae in MS E.V.5, and the photographs of the stolen folios had already been circulated by the Carabinieri.

The leaves were eventually recovered by the Carabinieri TPC and returned to the Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino in November 2018.

Rossi reconstructed the codicological history of the manuscript, examined the Sotheby’s catalogues and the provenance presented for the leaves, and submitted her documentation to the Carabinieri TPC. Her research raised broader questions concerning due diligence, the responsibilities of auction houses and manuscript cataloguers, and the risks faced by scholars who investigate the circulation of stolen or dismembered cultural property.

The case is examined in her study From Sotheby’s to Character Assassination: The Case of Turin MS E.V.5, TCLA Journal and forms an essential part of the documented chronology that later became known as ReceptioGate.

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Recent discoveries: Giovanni Boccardi, known as Boccardino the Elder

In 2026, Rossi published Giovanni Boccardi (Boccardino il Vecchio) and His Family: New Archival Evidence and the Attribution of Guarneriana Ms. 198.

The volume presents previously unpublished archival evidence concerning the Florentine illuminator Giovanni Boccardi. Rossi identified his baptismal record in the archives of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, reconstructed his family genealogy, and reassessed the documentary foundations of his biography, training, and workshop.

The study also offers the first scholarly attribution of the Book of Hours MS 198 of the Biblioteca Guarneriana in San Daniele del Friuli to Boccardino the Elder and his workshop. Codicological, stylistic, documentary, and comparative analysis places the manuscript within the artistic production of one of the principal Florentine illuminators active between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Carla Rossi, Giovanni Boccardi (Boccardino il Vecchio) and His Family: New Archival Evidence and the Attribution of Guarneriana Ms. 198, Paris, Éditions Pigouchet, 2026.

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The Books of Hours of the Biblioteca Fardelliana

Rossi’s recent research has also brought renewed attention to the illuminated manuscripts preserved in the Biblioteca Fardelliana in Trapani.

Her investigation concerns two Books of Hours, MSS 16 and 17, which had remained largely unknown outside the library. Through the combined study of their texts, liturgical structures, decoration, provenance, and codicological features, Rossi has worked to establish their historical and artistic contexts.

Her study of MS 17 examines the manuscript in relation to the production associated with the Rouen illuminator Robert Boyvin and his workshop. Her research on MS 16 addresses its patronage, production, and historical transmission.

The project demonstrates the importance of studying manuscripts preserved in local public collections, where works of substantial historical and artistic value may remain unpublished or insufficiently catalogued. The results are being prepared for publication in a study devoted to the Books of Hours of the Biblioteca Fardelliana.

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The Lancelot en prose leaves at the Museo Civico “Amedeo Lia”

A further research project concerns three detached illuminated leaves preserved at the Museo Civico “Amedeo Lia” in La Spezia, inventory numbers 519, 520, and 521.

The leaves belong to the textual and iconographic tradition of the Lancelot en prose, one of the most widely transmitted Arthurian narratives of the Middle Ages. Rossi’s investigation aims to recover their original codicological context by analysing the text preserved on both sides of each leaf, the sequence of the episodes, the dimensions and layout, the decoration, and their relationship with other surviving parts of the dismembered manuscript.

The project is particularly relevant to the mission of the OProM. Museum collections frequently preserve detached leaves whose artistic value has been recognised while their original textual and material context remains to be reconstructed. Philological and codicological analysis makes it possible to move beyond the isolated image and to restore each leaf to the narrative, material, and historical structure of the book to which it belonged.

The research will form the basis of a monographic study of the three Lancelot en prose leaves held by the Museo Civico “Amedeo Lia”.

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Women and manuscript production

Another central field of Rossi’s research concerns women as scribes, illuminators, patrons, readers, and owners of books.

Her work reconstructs female networks of manuscript production in monasteries and urban workshops from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance. As part of this research, she created the Map of Female Book Production Centres in Europe, originally conceived as a teaching resource and still used in courses on European women illuminators.

These studies are presented in Beyond the Margins: Female Illuminators in Medieval and Renaissance Europe and in the expanded Italian version, Oltre i margini: il linguaggio artistico delle miniatrici europee. Particular attention is devoted to works by women artists that have subsequently been dismembered, dispersed, or removed from their original codicological contexts.

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Selected publications and mss reconstructions

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2026

  • Giovanni Boccardi (Boccardino il Vecchio) and His Family: New Archival Evidence and the Attribution of Guarneriana Ms. 198, Éditions Pigouchet.

  • Oltre i margini: il linguaggio artistico delle miniatrici europee, Libreriauniversitaria.

  • From Sotheby’s to Character Assassination: The Case of Turin MS E.V.5.

  • Study and reconstruction of MSS 16 and 17 of the Biblioteca Fardelliana.

  • Research on the three Lancelot en prose leaves held by the Museo Civico “Amedeo Lia”, La Spezia.

2025

  • Beyond the Margins: Female Illuminators in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, Ethics International Press.
    Desiderio e interdizione. L’amore nella lirica europea, with Raffaele Pinto, Alta Formazione Editrice.

  • Miniatrici fiamminghe. Il Libro d’Ore miniato da Babekin e Tannekin Boems. Commentario al manoscritto W.173 di Baltimora, Imago.

  • Il laccio d’amore H&M. Il Libro d’ore di Hendrik III van Nassau e Mencía de Mendoza. Commentario, Imago.

  • “Biblioclasm for Profit: The Legal Implications of Dismembering Western Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts”, Harvard Art Law Review.

2024

  • Isabelle Boursier’s Book of Hours: A Dismembered Manuscript from Mary Benson’s Collection, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
    Digital Reconstruction of a Dismembered Book of Hours Illuminated by Robert Boyvin, with Alex Martin, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

  • The 1879 Theft of Royal MS 16 E VIII from the British Museum: Wars and Tolkien’s Teacher’s Role, Cambridge Scholars Publishing

 

Foundational study

  • “Biblioclasm for Profit and the Fetishisation of Manuscript Leaves”, Studj Romanzi, XVIII, 2022, pp. 161–183.
     

Teaching and research 

Within the Institute, Rossi coordinates research and adult education in manuscript studies, provenance research, biblioclasm, and digital reconstruction. Her courses combine theoretical instruction with practical case studies, allowing participants to examine texts, images, foliation, dimensions, ruling patterns, liturgical structures, provenance records, and auction documentation.

Her teaching is based on the principle that the history of a manuscript cannot be separated from its material integrity. A detached leaf must therefore be studied not only as an image or collectible object, but as part of a textual, codicological, and historical whole.

 

External Links:

 

ReceptioGate: documentation and institutional response

The public campaign directed against Carla Rossi began after her research into manuscript dismemberment, provenance, and the stolen leaves of Turin MS E.V.5. The chronology, legal decisions, publications, and supporting documents are presented separately from this scientific profile in the OProM and ReceptioGate documentary sections.

The most recent book-length reconstruction is:

Jordi Puig, The ReceptioGate Affair 2026: New Evidence on Peter Kidd, the Sotheby’s Sale of Stolen Leaves from Turin MS E.V.5, and the Defamation Campaign that Followed, Paris, Éditions Pigouchet, 2026. ​https://books.google.com/books?id=bj7sEQAAQBAJ

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