Voltaire Foundation, Oxford

13/02/2025

In 1952 the celebrated theatre director Erwin Piscator returned to his hometown of Marburg from his exile in the United States. During the 1920s, before leaving Germany in 1931, Piscator had been the most famous communist theatre director in Berlin. Once established in New York in 1939 and throughout the 1940s he became a sought-after drama teacher for many a future Hollywood star....

In 1952 the celebrated theatre director Erwin Piscator returned to his hometown of Marburg from his exile in the United States. During the 1920s, before leaving Germany in 1931, Piscator had been t…

07/02/2025

The Dictionnaire Universel de Commerce by Jacques Savary des Brûlons is widely recognized as an important source for numerous articles, particularly those related to economics, trade and law, in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert. Indeed, the authors and editors of the Encyclopédie project made use of many contemporary references resources including, but certainly not limited to Chambers…...

The Dictionnaire Universel de Commerce by Jacques Savary des Brûlons is widely recognized as an important source for numerous articles, particularly those related to economics, trade and law, …

28/01/2025

The Voltaire Room in the Taylor Institution opened its door to readers exactly fifty years ago. Here is the story… Theodore Besterman (1904-1976) established the Voltaire Foundation to carry out major publishing projects relating to the French Enlightenment, and in the early 1970s, two Oxford academics, both specialists in the French Enlightenment, Robert Shackleton, Bodley’s Librarian, and Giles Barber, the Taylor Librarian, proposed to him that the Voltaire Foundation should pass to Oxford on his death, together with a fund that would ensure the continuation of the publication projects that he had begun....

The Voltaire Room in the Taylor Institution opened its door to readers exactly fifty years ago. Here is the story… Theodore Besterman (1904-1976) established the Voltaire Foundation to carry out ma…

23/01/2025

Qu’y a-t-il de commun entre le « Dossier sur l’affaire Jore »1 publié par la Voltaire Foundation en 2022 dans le volume contenant l’édition des Letters concerning the English Nation2 et le manuscrit du Nouveau Système du monde ou Entretiens de Telliamed philosophe indien avec un missionnaire français3, manuscrit de base de l’édition critique du Telliamed…...

Qu’y a-t-il de commun entre le « Dossier sur l’affaire Jore »1 publié par la Voltaire Foundation en 2022 dans le volume contenant l’édition des Letters concerning the English Nation2 et le manuscri…

19/12/2024

Those familiar with the ARTFL Project and our work know that we specialise in handling digitised text. Our primary focus is to develop digitised text corpora (mostly in French) and software platforms that scholars and students can use to conduct research on those corpora. Images and image resources have been and always will be a secondary consideration for us. Nevertheless, we have many high-quality, high-resolution images that are remarkable objects of study in their own right and offer significant supplements to our text databases....

Those familiar with the ARTFL Project and our work know that we specialise in handling digitised text. Our primary focus is to develop digitised text corpora (mostly in French) and software platfor…

12/12/2024

We are delighted to introduce ‘L’Écriture est la peinture de la voix: essays in honour of Nicholas Cronk‘, the latest special collection from Modern Languages Open which is available to read Open Access. Professor Nicholas Cronk at Monticello in December 2018 (photographer Miles Young.) This festschrift has been published in honour of Professor Nicholas Cronk, Professor of European Enlightenment Studies; Fellow of St Edmund Hall and Wolfson College, Président de la Société des études voltairiennes, and Director of the Voltaire Foundation....

We are delighted to introduce ‘L’Écriture est la peinture de la voix: essays in honour of Nicholas Cronk‘, the latest special collection from Modern Languages Open which is available…

06/12/2024

My recently published Voltaire: A Reference Guide to His Life and Works offers 21st-century readers a glimpse into the multifaceted Voltaire: the thinker, rebel, writer, exile, and campaigner who became a transnational celebrity in his day. The Guide is targeted at readers who are new to Voltaire as well as at students already familiar with his life and works. But hitting such a target is never simple....

My recently published Voltaire: A Reference Guide to His Life and Works offers 21st-century readers a glimpse into the multifaceted Voltaire: the thinker, rebel, writer, exile, and campaigner who b…

26/11/2024

At first it felt like this book originated from a chance encounter between two individuals, but in hindsight it almost takes on an air of inevitability. In 2015 Ere Nokkala and I were sharing an office at the Lichtenberg Kolleg, the Göttingen Institute for Advanced Studies. We both came from the same university, the European University Institute in Florence, we shared the same supervisor, Martin van Gelderen, who had been appointed as the director of the Institute in 2012, and we both had the same external supervisor, Hans Erich Bödeker....

At first it felt like this book originated from a chance encounter between two individuals, but in hindsight it almost takes on an air of inevitability. In 2015 Ere Nokkala and I were sharing an of…

15/11/2024

If you missed our annual Besterman Lecture last week, given by Cécile Vidal (EHESS, Paris), you can now catch up and watch the recording on our YouTube channel!

We are delighted to have Cécile Vidal (EHESS, Paris) giving our annual Besterman Lecture.The lecture took place on Thursday 7 November, 5pm, Grove Auditorium...

07/11/2024

At the Weston Library until 15 Dec. 2024 Voltaire clearly had few qualms about marking his reading materials. From extensive revisions, through pithy remarks, to the occasional hastily scribbled manicule, his reading materials are fascinating records of his thought processes and his readerly interactions with the texts he was writing and reading. The subject of marking books and manuscripts is currently being explored in an exhibition in the Weston Library’s Blackwell Hall in Oxford....

At the Weston Library until 15 Dec. 2024 Voltaire clearly had few qualms about marking his reading materials. From extensive revisions, through pithy remarks, to the occasional hastily scribbled ma…

17/10/2024

A branch of breadfruit, with leaves, flowers, and fruits, by Sydney Parkinson, 1769 (Natural History Museum, London). On 23 January 1793, a curious ship entered Kingstown harbour on the Caribbean Island of Saint Vincent. The decks of HMS Providence were so filled with its cargo of live, potted plants that the ship’s lieutenant would call the vessel a ‘...

A branch of breadfruit, with leaves, flowers, and fruits, by Sydney Parkinson, 1769 (Natural History Museum, London). On 23 January 1793, a curious ship entered Kingstown harbour on the Caribbean I…

03/10/2024

Portrait of Pope after William H***e (St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford). The publication of Howard Erskine-Hill’s Alexander Pope. A Literary Biography marks ten years since the death of its distinguished author (the story of the book’s travails is told in the Editor’s Note). It also comes, more or less, in the seventy-fifth year since the publication of Austin Warren’s…...

Portrait of Pope after William H***e (St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford). The publication of Howard Erskine-Hill’s Alexander Pope. A Literary Biography marks ten years since the death of it…

26/09/2024

When I was invited to write this blog post about my recent Digital Humanities Advancement Grant award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, I finally did what so many colleagues have furtively, tremulously been doing for the past two years: I asked ChatGPT a question. Overall accurate if occasionally inane, ChatGPT’s compilation of commonplaces comes reasonably close to the thematic categories an expert might have chosen to describe in layman’s terms the correspondence of Catherine II, empress of Russia 1762-1796....

When I was invited to write this blog post about my recent Digital Humanities Advancement Grant award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, I finally did what so many colleagues have furt…

23/09/2024

Applications are now open for next year’s MSc in Digital Scholarship, for entry in October 2025.
The purpose of the MSc in Digital Scholarship is to introduce students to the full range of issues which arise when digital tools and methods are applied to traditional humanist scholarship. It has been designed to equip students to surmount those challenges and to develop an ambitious, digitally-enhanced scholarly project of their own. The course is based in the Humanities Division and spans a wide range of disciplines across all of its faculties. Students on the course also benefit from teaching provided by the Bodleian Libraries.

More information on the course and how to apply can be found here: https://www.humanities.ox.ac.uk/mscdigsch


The application deadline is 7 January 2025.

19/09/2024

Que font donc les deux mains que nous avons réussi à identifier dans ce manuscrit qui se trouve parmi les papiers de Mme Du Deffand ? Le copiste, lui, fait son métier. Sur trente pages, il donne la copie d’un texte anonyme qui s’intitule, « Pensées diverses / pour servir d’eclaircissements a quelques / endroits des principes de la philosophie morale / ou de l’essai sur le merite & sur la vertu »....

[Suite et fin : pour le premier volet de ce billet de blog, voir ici] Que font donc les deux mains que nous avons réussi à identifier dans ce manuscrit qui se trouve parmi les papiers de Mme&n…

12/09/2024

Il vaut toujours la peine de s’intéresser à l’inclassable, au non-classé, à ce qui a été classé dans la catégorie « Divers », « Autres papiers », « Papiers sans importance ». J’ai consacré mon premier séjour à la Lewis Walpole Library (Yale) à regarder la troisième série des papiers de Mme Du Deffand, dite « Other Papers ». Il s’agit de cinq cartons qui contiennent toutes sortes de morceaux de prose et de vers....

Il vaut toujours la peine de s’intéresser à l’inclassable, au non-classé, à ce qui a été classé dans la catégorie « Divers », « Autres papiers », « Papiers sans importance&…

22/08/2024

The Sainte Cène du patriarche (c.1772), painted by Genevan artist Jean Huber, and used as the background image on this very blog, is a well-known representation of Voltaire and several of his contemporaries, and has over the years been reproduced many times. It depicts an entirely fictional scene, bringing together a sub-set of the philosophes (among them D’Alembert, La Harpe, Grimm, Saint-Lambert, Diderot and Condorcet) in a space apparently representing the château at Ferney, which some of them never visited....

The Sainte Cène du patriarche (c.1772), painted by Genevan artist Jean Huber, and used as the background image on this very blog, is a well-known representation of Voltaire and several of his conte…

25/07/2024

Nicolas Grenier’s Voltaire à la plage: la liberté dans un transat is the latest in a collection of short books published by Dunod, which already includes treatments of Shakespeare, Churchill and Proust, among others. The series seems aimed at entertaining a summer holiday readership, a bit like those English novels mainly sold at airports, and the volumes all face the difficult test of making a serious topic attractive and accessible....

Nicolas Grenier’s Voltaire à la plage: la liberté dans un transat is the latest in a collection of short books published by Dunod, which already includes treatments of Shakespeare, Churchill and Pr…