Voltaire Foundation, Oxford

Voltaire Foundation, Oxford The Voltaire Foundation at University of Oxford is a research centre and academic publisher specialising in the 18th century. boundaries.

Founded in 1976 with the mission to lead research and publishing on the 18th century across all disciplines & geogr. The Voltaire Foundation is a world leader for eighteenth-century scholarship, publishing the definitive edition of the Complete Works of Voltaire (Œuvres complètes de Voltaire), as well as Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment (previously SVEC), and the correspondences of several key French thinkers.

Voltaire’s chair, fashioned as a writing desk and now in the Musée Carnavalet, is the focus of a chapter in my doctoral ...
10/10/2025

Voltaire’s chair, fashioned as a writing desk and now in the Musée Carnavalet, is the focus of a chapter in my doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto, examining global interchanges of art and ideas in eighteenth-century Paris. Finished in Asian-style lacquer, it is a French chair shaped by foreign sensibilities. More than a relic of craftsmanship, this working chair was commissioned in anticipation of Voltaire’s celebrated return to Paris and became part of his final days there, standing as both a practical tool of writing and a diplomatic gift honouring the philosophe....

Voltaire’s chair, fashioned as a writing desk and now in the Musée Carnavalet, is the focus of a chapter in my doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto, examining global interchanges of a…

Three principal collections of engraved portraits of Voltaire are held respectively by the Royal Library of Belgium, the...
26/09/2025

Three principal collections of engraved portraits of Voltaire are held respectively by the Royal Library of Belgium, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Austrian National Library. While each one was assembled under very different historical circumstances, together they form the most exhaustive corpus of Voltaire’s representations in print. As part of my research for the forthcoming Voltaire Iconography database…...

Three principal collections of engraved portraits of Voltaire are held respectively by the Royal Library of Belgium, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Austrian National Library. While e…

The theme addressed in The Legacy of the Enlightenment. Rights, Constitutions, Equality edited by Vincenzo Ferrone, Vale...
19/09/2025

The theme addressed in The Legacy of the Enlightenment. Rights, Constitutions, Equality edited by Vincenzo Ferrone, Valentina Altopiedi and Giuseppe Grieco stems from research carried out within the framework of the Turin Humanities Programme over many years. The necessity of reflecting upon the legacy of the Enlightenment in the centuries following the eighteenth century became both urgent and inescapable immediately after 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the tragic communist illusion....

The theme addressed in The Legacy of the Enlightenment. Rights, Constitutions, Equality edited by Vincenzo Ferrone, Valentina Altopiedi and Giuseppe Grieco stems from research carried out within th…

The Voltaire Foundation and Liverpool University Press are delighted to announce that the new online edition of Voltaire...
10/09/2025

The Voltaire Foundation and Liverpool University Press are delighted to announce that the new online edition of Voltaire’s complete works, including extensive scholarly apparatus, is now available on a free trial basis to libraries before its official launch in January 2026. OV homepage using French-language interface. Oxford University Voltaire (OV) is a ground-breaking online resource which provides the best scholarly edition of the works of Voltaire....

The Voltaire Foundation and Liverpool University Press are delighted to announce that the new online edition of Voltaire’s complete works, including extensive scholarly apparatus, is now available …

Cultural transmission and the French Enlightenment, edited by Hanna Roman and Olivia Sabee, has recently been published ...
04/09/2025

Cultural transmission and the French Enlightenment, edited by Hanna Roman and Olivia Sabee, has recently been published in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series. The volume illuminates material forms of knowledge and their circulation, defining Enlightenment as invention, repurposing, and reception. In this blog post, the editors return to the collection for the first time since its completion, offering fresh reflections on the essays and considering their resonance in the current political climate....

Cultural transmission and the French Enlightenment, edited by Hanna Roman and Olivia Sabee, has recently been published in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series. The volume illu…

The Taylor Institution Library (Bodleian Libraries) has recently acquired a rare printing of Candide dating from the Rev...
28/08/2025

The Taylor Institution Library (Bodleian Libraries) has recently acquired a rare printing of Candide dating from the Revolutionary period: this edition of 1791 was not known to the principal bibliographer of Voltaire, Georges Bengesco, and it seems not to be present in any French library, though there are apparently other copies in Geneva and Louvain. The first publication of Candide…...

The Taylor Institution Library (Bodleian Libraries) has recently acquired a rare printing of Candide dating from the Revolutionary period: this edition of 1791 was not known to the principal biblio…

Prior to the widespread use of gummed envelopes in the nineteenth century, letter writers would need to carefully and cr...
21/08/2025

Prior to the widespread use of gummed envelopes in the nineteenth century, letter writers would need to carefully and creatively fold their sheet(s) of paper to produce a secure packet. This process, known as letterlocking, was a commonplace practice in the eighteenth century and Voltaire was consequently no stranger to this form of epistolary origami. One of his most used letterlocking methods of choice was the 'Tuck-and-Seal':...

Prior to the widespread use of gummed envelopes in the nineteenth century, letter writers would need to carefully and creatively fold their sheet(s) of paper to produce a secure packet. This proces…

In his new book The Tremors of Translation: An Edition of Voltaire’s ‘Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne’ (1756) (Legenda...
01/08/2025

In his new book The Tremors of Translation: An Edition of Voltaire’s ‘Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne’ (1756) (Legenda, Cambridge, 2025), Clive Scott encourages us to go back and experience afresh Voltaire’s poem about the Lisbon earthquake. This natural catastrophe occurred on 1 November 1755, and it took three weeks for the news to reach Geneva. Voltaire’s immediate response was categorical: ‘La Providence en a dans le c**!’ An early manuscript of the…...

In his new book The Tremors of Translation: An Edition of Voltaire’s ‘Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne’ (1756) (Legenda, Cambridge, 2025), Clive Scott encourages us to go back and experience afres…

Call for Papers – Voltaire in the Baltic World: Circulations, Receptions, LegaciesOur colleague Sophie Turner is organis...
24/07/2025

Call for Papers – Voltaire in the Baltic World: Circulations, Receptions, Legacies

Our colleague Sophie Turner is organising this exciting conference in Tarttu, Estonia, next year, which the Voltaire Foundation is supporting.

5-6 March 2026, University of Tartu, Estonia In connection with an upcoming exhibition on Voltaire at the University of Tartu’s Museum of Art, and in collaboration with the Voltaire Foundation…

Cultural Transmission and the French Enlightenment: Repurposing the Past, edited by Hanna Roman and Olivia Sabee, is the...
18/07/2025

Cultural Transmission and the French Enlightenment: Repurposing the Past, edited by Hanna Roman and Olivia Sabee, is the July 2025 volume in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series. This blog post by series editor Gregory Brown commemorates its publication as the 671st volume, celebrating the 70th anniversary of the series. Emphasizing the entangled nature of eighteenth-century thought and its reception, these essays ask where the past ends and its interpretation begins....

Cultural Transmission and the French Enlightenment: Repurposing the Past, edited by Hanna Roman and Olivia Sabee, is the July 2025 volume in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment serie…

Among non-specialists, it remains a commonplace that Germans played little, if any, appreciable role in the transatlanti...
27/06/2025

Among non-specialists, it remains a commonplace that Germans played little, if any, appreciable role in the transatlantic slave system. Even some specialists in German history have assumed that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German-language commentaries on transatlantic slavery were primarily oblique interventions in debates of more obvious local relevance, such as serfdom.[1] In one essay published in 2001, the pre-eminent historian Jürgen Osterhammel even suggested that Germans’ absence from transatlantic slavery was one plausible explanation for Hitler’s rise to power....

Among non-specialists, it remains a commonplace that Germans played little, if any, appreciable role in the transatlantic slave system. Even some specialists in German history have assumed that eig…

This blog is based on the article by Gillian Pink, ‘L’allégorie d’Alcibiade et le dossier génétique de Candide’, recentl...
20/06/2025

This blog is based on the article by Gillian Pink, ‘L’allégorie d’Alcibiade et le dossier génétique de Candide’, recently published in the R***e Voltaire 24 (2025), p.239-251. Deciding to read Voltaire’s correspondence from start to finish (over 20 000 letters, in 45 volumes), as I did in late 2023, certainly entails an element of foolhardiness. People react with disbelief, and murmurs of the word ‘mad’ can be heard....

This blog is based on the article by Gillian Pink, ‘L’allégorie d’Alcibiade et le dossier génétique de Candide’, recently published in the R***e Voltaire 24 (2025), p.239-251. Deciding to read Volt…

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