ANNUAL REPORT 2022/23
VOLTAIRE FOUNDATION
University of Oxford
Welcome
This has been an exciting year for the Voltaire Foundation:
after completing the paper edition of the Complete Works
of Voltaire in 2022, we have spent the year charting a
new course as a digitally-focused research department
for Enlightenment studies. We now have a superb and
growing group of postdoctoral students, whose projects
are highlighted in this annual report. At the same time,
we have been busy transforming our traditional expertise
in textual editing into the digital realm. Our new online
journal, Digital Enlightenment Studies, will be launched
in autumn 2023; and after intensive work on the Voltaire
edition, we are on course to launch the new digital
Complete Voltaire in 2024. This is set to become our
flagship project, and we are currently discussing what
name to give it – watch this space!
Nicholas Cronk, Director
It is especially gratifying that we have
successfully completed what is arguably the
largest academic book publishing project of
the last 100 years – the 205 volumes of the
Complete Works of Voltaire – while at the same
time setting out on a very ambitious programme
of digitisation, pioneering new techniques and
methodologies both for Oxford and the wider
world, and doing so at significant scale.
As the Voltaire Foundation moves from a focus
on Voltaire to one which encompasses the
Enlightenment more broadly, I believe this
could not be more important. Enlightenment
values – free thinking and free speaking – are
under attack from many sources: making the
process of digitisation which enables them to
be accessed not just in a scholarly way but also
more broadly in the public domain, even more important, putting them at the heart of modern
discourse. As debates about the acuteness of artificial intelligence gather pace, nothing could
also be more timely. The medium for us, to a significant degree, must be the message.
I hope you find this report of our activity in 2022/23 informative.
Miles Young, Chair of Voltaire Foundation Fund Board of Management
2 | VOLTAIRE FOUNDATION ANNUAL REPORT 2022/23
News from the Lab
The Voltaire Lab saw its first intake of postdoctoral
researchers and a graduate student (in collaboration
with the Humanities Division). This year, we were
delighted to welcome Roman Kuhn, British Academy
Newton International Fellow (report on p.7), Zoe Screti,
Astra Foundation Research Fellow in Manuscript Studies
(report on p.6) and Joana Roqué Pesquer, one of the
first generation of the Humanities Division’s new MSc
course in Digital Scholarship and the first recipient of
the Voltaire Foundation Bursary for this course (report
on p.9).
We are also participating for the first time this year in
UNIQ+, an innovative scheme run by the University
News
Launch of Digital Enlightenment Studies
This year saw us prepare the launch of our new
online journal, Digital Enlightenment Studies (DES), in
association with our long-standing publishing partner
Liverpool University Press.
DES is an open-access, international, peer-reviewed
online journal dedicated to digital humanities, their
methodologies and resources, in 18th-century studies.
The journal will publish in English and French and
welcomes contributions in areas such as digital editions,
building and exploiting corpora, database construction,
linked open data, domain adaptation of methods,
operationalisation of concepts, text annotation, and
the interpretability, transparency and reproducibility
of results.
The team in the Voltaire Lab ofce
Standing l.t.r.: Gillian Pink, Roman Kuhn, Zoe Screti, Joana Roqué
Pesquer, Birgit Mikus
Seated l.t.r.: Hayley O’Connell, Nicholas Cronk, Alison Oliver
(photography ©Keiko Ikeuchi)
of Oxford providing research internships for talented
undergraduate students from under-represented
backgrounds and giving them the opportunity to
experience postgraduate study and research over the
course of a seven-week summer programme. Find out
more about what our four interns have been doing with
us on p.8-9.
VOLTAIRE FOUNDATION ANNUAL REPORT 2022/23 | 3
Since the celebrations of
the completion of the print
Voltaire edition, work on its
digital incarnation has taken
on a new momentum. 2023
saw Apex CoVantage deliver
the final digitised volume of
the 205, with all 107,500+
pages not only totally
rekeyed, but impressively
tagged to the very high-level
specification drawn up by our
digital consultant, Dan Barker
(DanCan Ltd). All digitised
volumes are subjected to
rigorous checks, and further
undergo a second process of
semantic tagging, whereby
specific types of content
(such as dates, bibliographic
information, quotes and
proper nouns) are identified and encoded by specialist
editors. All decisions made are fed back into custom-
made algorithms in order to improve the identification
of these elements automatically, thus increasing the
efciency of the editorial work.
In parallel, it has been exciting to hold frequent
discussions about the functionality of Digital Voltaire,
and to see our ideas taking shape in a wireframe. This
visual manifestation will serve as a demonstration of
the resource before it is fully developed, thus giving key
stakeholders a preview, as well as the opportunity to
give feedback. While possibilities such as full searches,
or linking to outside resources, are easy to imagine, and
indeed are a given, we are particularly keen to explore
other ways of navigating and interpreting the data,
as well as new methods for visualising how Voltaire’s
text changed over time across diferent manuscript
and print editions, or how multiple letters within the
correspondence are related to and interact with each
other.
Digital Voltaire
Above: Alison Oliver and Gillian Pink in the Voltaire Lab
(photography ©Keiko Ikeuchi)
Below: the Digital Voltaire wireframe work in progress
Opposite: the Voltaire Library Database
We are investigating several options regarding the
financial model, the marketing and the dissemination
of Digital Voltaire, all of which necessarily go hand-
in-hand.
4 | VOLTAIRE FOUNDATION ANNUAL REPORT 2022/23
Voltaire Studio
Regardless of the model adopted for the main resource,
it will have an important open-access component in
the Voltaire Studio. Last year we reported on the first
stages of the Voltaire Library Database, undertaken in
collaboration with ObTIC (Observatoire des textes, des
idées et des corpus) (Sorbonne), and are pleased to
announce that it will be publicly launched in autumn
2023. It is the fullest set of data regarding the books
(c.6000 volumes) and manuscripts (c.1000) that Voltaire
is known to have owned and used, bringing together
information from four main sources. These include the
1961 Russian-published catalogue of his books now
held in the National Library of Russia (we have corrected
some errors that have been identified in the decades
following its publication), and the 1912 inventory of the
manuscripts in the same collection. It will link to both
Digital Voltaire – most notably the edited marginalia –
and the Catalogue of Manuscripts relating to Voltaire
(see p.6). These online databases will ofer extensive
research possibilities in conjunction with Digital
Voltaire and each other,
but will also act as valuable
free-standing resources to
scholars all over the world.
The attractive user interface
and its sophisticated yet
intuitive search capabilities
are the work of Staltech
Europe Ltd, funded by a
generous grant from the
John Fell Fund (University of
Oxford). To read more about
the work that has gone into
digitally reconstructing the
200 composite volumes in
Voltaire’s library fashioned
out of shorter printed works
and sometimes manuscripts,
see p.9.
Digital d’Holbach
As well as tackling the transformation of an archival
corpus to a digital platform, the VF is exploring the
distinctive challenges of developing a born-digital
edition with the Digital d’Holbach project, which aims
to create a digital scholarly edition of the writings
of radical Enlightenment philosopher and ‘father
of atheism’ Paul-Thiry d’Holbach. Several editions
are already under way and at different stages of
completion. Funded in tandem by the British Academy
and the Leverhulme Trust, our edition of d’Holbach’s
correspondence, in particular, will significantly
advance knowledge on the Radical Enlightenment
and the circulation of ideas in 18th-century Europe.
It will also provide crucial data for a study of the
reception of d’Holbach’s ideas in late 18th-century
and Revolutionary France, as well as for an intellectual
biography of d’Holbach.
Alongside the edition, and largely thanks to it,
Holbachian studies at the Voltaire Foundation
continue to thrive. Ruggero Sciuto’s
monograph on d’Holbach’s and Diderot’s
theory of determinism was published earlier
this year in the Oxford University Studies in
the Enlightenment series, and the recent
conference of the International Society
for Eighteenth-Century Studies gave three
members of our team a chance to showcase
their research. Meanwhile, Ruggero Sciuto
and Gillian Pink are working on an addition
to Jeroom Vercruysse’s bibliography of
d’Holbach’s publications – an indispensable step
towards the completion of the project – and a great
collaborative volume on d’Holbach’s masterpiece, the
Système de la nature, is gradually taking shape.
Read Ruggero
Sciuto’s
article in
Dix-huitième
siècle on the
Digital
d’Holbach
project
VOLTAIRE FOUNDATION ANNUAL REPORT 2022/23 | 5
Catalogue of Manuscripts relating to Voltaire
Dr Zoe Screti, Astra Foundation Research Fellow in Manuscript Studies, is working on the
Catalogue of Manuscripts relating to Voltaire, establishing the data model for the catalogue,
identifying fields for inclusion, and considering how best to link the catalogue to the wider
Digital Voltaire project.
Postdoctoral Research Projects
Left: Zoe Screti in the Voltaire Lab (photography ©Keiko Ikeuchi)
Right: CMV in development
CMV (Catalogue of Manuscripts relating to Voltaire /
Catalogue des manuscrits relatifs à Voltaire) is a digital
union catalogue that brings together international
collections of Voltaire manuscripts, uniting records of
these manuscripts in the same place for the first time.
Begun in October 2022 and generously supported
by the Astra Foundation, the project will result in
an open-access, fully searchable resource that will
significantly impact Voltaire scholarship by enabling
new discoveries to be made, and fresh connections
between sources to be drawn.
The catalogue will contain approximately 20,000
entries for manuscripts produced by, or relating to,
Voltaire. These include a wide variety of sources from
repositories across the world and include such diverse
items as Voltaire’s abundant correspondence, drafts
and copies of his works, diary entries by third parties
detailing meetings with Voltaire, commonplace books
including quotes from Voltaire’s works, and even a
Jamaican almanac. Standardised typologies have
been employed throughout to enhance searchability,
maintain consistency, and enable users to filter results
efciently, and it is hoped that this will result in a
resource that prioritises user experience.
CMV pushes the boundaries of what a manuscript
catalogue is, moving beyond traditional bibliographic
entries to include information on often neglected, but
nevertheless crucially important, aspects of archival
materials such as marginalia, watermarks and signs
of use. In doing so, the catalogue seeks to support
a variety of research needs, from ambitious big-
data visualisations to the most microscopic studies
of the materiality of the text. The catalogue also
provides direct links to archival repositories and digital
resources, works symbiotically with the Voltaire Library
Database, and will link to Digital Voltaire at a later stage.
The catalogue website will feature a host of additional
resources and data visualisations of particular interest
to teachers and students, such as videos demonstrating
the processes of letter locking and guides to
understanding 18th-century handwriting. CMV will
therefore be a crucial starting point for established
researchers working on Voltaire and the 18th century,
as well as an informative introduction to Voltaire, the
Enlightenment and manuscript culture.
We are working closely with Staltech Europe Ltd to
develop the back-end data entry system and the front-
end user interface, with the catalogue being launched
at the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (ITEM)
in Paris in March 2024. We would like to thank the
donors who have made possible the building of this
resource: the Astra Foundation, and the John Fell Fund,
University of Oxford.
6 | VOLTAIRE FOUNDATION ANNUAL REPORT 2022/23
Communicating Enlightenment in ephemeral poetry: subversion, sociability and gossip
in 18th-century poésies fugitives
Dr Roman Kuhn joined us from the Freie Universität Berlin as British Academy Newton
International Fellow. He is pursuing a research project on 18th-century poésie fugitive,
occasional poetry that ‘escaped’ from the author’s (or recipient’s) portfolio and was circulated
to a broader audience in print or manuscript.
Read Roman’s
blogs on his
project so far
Above: François-Félix
Nogaret, Le Fond du sac
ou restant des babioles de
M. X.*** Membre éveillé de
l’Académie des Dormans.
À Venise [Paris]: Chez
Pantalon-Phébus [Cazin],
1780. All things ephemeral
in this illustration (soap
bubbles, mayflies, rainbow,
etc.) as well as the title of the
publication, Le Fond du sac,
and the section-title ‘pièces
fugitives, ou riens’ make
for a carefully constructed
semblance of negligence.
Right: Roman Kuhn in the
Voltaire Lab (photography
©Keiko Ikeuchi)
18th-century poésie
fugitive is elusive in more
than one way. First,
the poems themselves
are (or pretend to be)
ephemeral creations,
anchored in a more or less
private sociable setting.
And second, and more
importantly, it is not evident how to conceptually pin
down this type of poetry. Diderot, in the Encyclopédie,
characterised ‘pièces fugitives’ as texts that are
circulated first in manuscript and within a restricted
circle of readers and only later are disseminated to a
wider audience; they are, to use a modern term, texts
that are ‘leaked’ to the public. Diderot’s definition is
one that focuses almost exclusively on the production
and publication of fugitive verse and prose. At the same
time, poésie fugitive has acquired a generic meaning,
signifying ‘light verse’, no matter how it was produced,
disseminated and published.
No less challenging than the conceptual fuzziness is
the sheer volume. Poésies fugitives come en masse
and can be found at various locations: dedicated
recueils de poésies, anthologies, journals (the Mercure
de France has a separate section for poésie fugitive),
as an appendix to more substantial works, etc. Poésie
fugitive infiltrates almost all areas and markets within
the print sphere; it is practised by celebrities like
Voltaire, whose fugitive poetry is a coveted material
throughout the 18th century, as well as by minor and
virtually unknown poets.
The project aims to reconstruct this type of poetry
both conceptually and historically. Working with
contemporary reflections on the genre (if it is a
genre) and the poetics embedded within the poems
themselves, it tries to reconstruct the use and
development of this conceptual domain of poetry.
Another aim is to reconstruct the networks created
by fugitive poetry. As an eminently sociable form of
literature it connects poets and their audience; as a
short form that lends itself to being published and
republished, collected, transcribed and disseminated
in various ways, it also shows networks of publication
and text reuse.
The term poésie fugitive, interestingly, is used almost
exclusively in France with no direct equivalents in
other European languages and literatures. This,
however, does not mean that the literary
practice across Europe did not develop
comparable phenomena all over the
continent. A symposium held in spring 2024
will bring together specialists on diferent
European literatures in order to consider the
international dimension of fugitive poetry
and discuss afnities as well as diferences
between European literatures.
VOLTAIRE FOUNDATION ANNUAL REPORT 2022/23 | 7
The Voltaire Lab
The Voltaire Lab, now in its fifth year of existence,
continues to be a hub of research activity centred
around Voltaire’s digital corpora and, more generally,
the interface of digital humanities methods and
collections with 18th-century studies. Thanks to the
generous support of the Astra Foundation, we were
able to continue our main research and development
efforts for 2022/23, including the Voltaire Library
Database, whose data entry is largely completed, and
the Catalogue of Manuscripts relating to Voltaire, a
project led by postdoctoral fellow Zoe Screti. We are
currently developing a new interface for these two
databases which will allow users to query and visualise
their contents in a variety of new ways.
The Voltaire Lab continued to work closely with the
Sorbonne across various projects, and in particular
with the ObTIC (Observatoire des textes, des idées
et des corpus) project team, currently based at the
Bibliothèque nationale de France DataLab, and the
European Research Council-funded project ModERN
(Modelling Enlightenment). Lab co-director Nicholas
Cronk gave the opening lecture of the ModERN project
launch in May 2023. Postdoctoral fellow Roman Kuhn
is working closely with the ModERN team and the BNF
DataLab to construct a large corpus of 18th-century
digitised press, a corpus that will prove useful for
tracing the publication and reception of poésie fugitive.
Postdoctoral fellow James Gawley (a joint post between
ObTIC and Oxford) continued his work on identifying
Latin allusions in Voltaire’s Henriade and was recently
awarded an ‘ERC-Access’ grant by the Agence Nationale
de la Recherche to continue his work in Paris for the
next two years.
Two important conferences this summer (the
International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
in Rome and the Digital Humanities conference in
Graz) provided the opportunity to showcase the Lab’s
research in digital intertextuality and network analysis.
UNIQ+ research interns in the Voltaire Lab: l.t.r. Charlotte D., Isra, Aušra, Charlotte W
UNIQ+
This summer the VF hosted four students on the UNIQ+ Research Internship programme
run by the University of Oxford, which aims to widen participation at postgraduate level by
ofering seven-week research internships to talented undergraduates.
Our interns worked in the Voltaire Lab on a variety of projects relating to their research interests.
Glenn Roe and Zoe Screti in the Voltaire Lab
Visualising Voltaire’s life and works
I am primarily working on creating a
timeline of Voltaire’s life, alongside
an interactive map of his travels. I am
also conducting independent research
exploring his interest in science and
creating a timeline to contextualise
his work in the history of science.
Charlotte White
I am working on creating interactive
digital resources to help people learn
more about Voltaire’s life, works and
cultural impact. These include a timeline
of Voltaire’s publications and a visual
database / network of his relationships.
Isra Hussein
8 | VOLTAIRE FOUNDATION ANNUAL REPORT 2022/23
Digital Voltaire metadata identification
I am working on the metadata of the Complete Works of Voltaire (1968-2022). Embracing the conduits of
contextual and historical-bibliographical influence, my project endeavours to pair the proper nouns populating
the edition with their corresponding encyclopaedic entries, contributing to the enrichment of the Digital Voltaire
resource. Aušra Bukniute
Voltaire and Rousseau iconography
I am creating a subset database of the images from the VF’s collection of Voltaire iconography featuring Voltaire
with Jean-Jacques Rousseau to trace the relationship between these two prominent Enlightenment figures.
Charlotte Disley
Voltaire’s pots-pourris
As the first student sponsored by the Voltaire Foundation to study the new MSc in Digital
Scholarship at the University of Oxford, Joana Roqué Pesquer has been working on the Voltaire
Library Database for both her practicum placement and her final master’s thesis.
Nicholas Cronk, Joana Roqué Pesquer and Gillian Pink
(photography ©Keiko Ikeuchi)
She has focused on Voltaire’s 200
composite volumes titled pots-pourris and
their contents. These collections are literary
medleys that escape all definition, since they
are all diferent from one another, but one
of the elements that figuratively binds them
together is the fact that they are the only
works made and compiled by Voltaire that
have not yet been thoroughly explored by
scholars. Nevertheless, they are crucial to an
understanding of how Voltaire used written
sources to critically engage with literary
tradition.
Joana started analysing the collections
by cataloguing them while correcting
and updating the 1961 Russian-published
catalogue of Voltaire’s library. She has
created the first searchable database of
these collections, providing a draft digital
catalogue that recreates the complex inner
mechanisms of the pots-pourris (volumes
split into diferent sections within a collection, multiple
copies of the same edition bound together, sections
torn apart, etc.). Completing the dataset has allowed
her to carry out tabular data analysis on the titles of
the 2000 works that the collections contain, through
topic modelling and keyword extraction methods,
such as the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), to identify
the most relevant and frequent topics. The goal has
been to add fields in the catalogue such as ‘estimated
year of creation’, or ‘classifications’, so that further
research can be developed on the importance of
the pots-pourris and their historical context. As well
as upgrading current bibliographic information, and
creating a searchable digital resource, Joana’s thesis
investigates how these polychronic and multitemporal
compilations shape the literary text itself, by creating a
comparative and intertextual space inside each volume
that alters meaning
between the texts
and the thematic and
discursive relationships
that emanate from
them.
Discover more
about the
pots-pourris
catalogue here
VOLTAIRE FOUNDATION ANNUAL REPORT 2022/23 | 9
Academic Events
Special lectures
In November 2022, Gregory Brown (University of
Nevada/VF), General Editor of Oxford University
Studies in the Enlightenment, presented an exciting
digital project at the Maison Française d’Oxford under
the title ‘Beaumarchais’s correspondence network:
textual corpus, metadata and social historiography’.
The 2022 Besterman Lecture was delivered by
Helena Rosenblatt (CUNY), an eminent historian of
political thought and an expert on the Enlightenment.
Professor Rosenblatt flew over from New York to talk
to a full lecture theatre at the Examination Schools on
‘Napoleon’s Nemesis: Madame de Staël and the Origins
of Liberalism’.
In May, we were delighted to welcome Peter B.
Kaufman (MIT and St Edmund Hall) to Oxford to give
a talk on ‘The Fifth Estate: Networks of Enlightenment
in the Age of Trump’, highlighting the VF’s continuing
commitment to opening up discussions about how the
values of Enlightenment translate to the contemporary
global context.
Watch the
Besterman
lecture on
our YouTube
channel
Top: Helena Rosenblatt (CUNY), 2022 Besterman Lecturer
Bottom: (l.t.r.) Andrew Kahn chairs Peter Kaufman’s talk at
St Edmund Hall, Oxford, May 2023
Bottom right: The 2022 Besterman Lecture, East Writing School,
Examination Schools, Oxford
Enlightenment workshop series 2023
Our interdisciplinary flagship seminar
returned to its in-person format after two
years online and moved to a new-old venue
at Magdalen College, where the seminar
had been launched in the 1990s by John
Robertson and Laurence Brockliss.
The 2023 series (January to May) featured renowned
international scholars as well as Oxford-based early-
career researchers. David Armitage (Harvard) attracted
a large public from diferent faculties for his discussion
of the impact of international law on Mozart’s Marriage
of Figaro. Friedrich Vollhardt (Munich) compared the
prominence of theodicy in works by Lessing and
Voltaire and Eva Piirimäe (Tartu) discussed Herder’s
changing views of the French Revolution. Luisa
Simonutti (Milan) talked on unpublished manuscripts by
John Locke that testify to the impact of early-modern
Arabic sources on his work, while Sanja Perovic (KCL)
shared with us the results of a collaborative project on
the transfer of revolutionary thought between Britain,
Italy and France. Jürgen Overhof (Münster) talked on
the understudied influence of the educational reformer
Basedow on Immanuel Kant’s pedagogical writings,
and Jefrey Ravel (MIT) fascinated us with a talk on
the unexpected uses of playing cards in 18th-century
France.
But the Enlightenment Workshop was not only a
forum for visiting eminent scholars from abroad:
the seminar also allowed Oxford-based postdocs
to showcase their research. Ruggero Sciuto (VF
and St Edmund Hall) focused on the radical end of
the scale in his paper on representations of female
atheists in 18th-century France, while Michelle Pfefer
(Magdalen College) spoke on a major representative
of the ‘religious Enlightenment’, William Warburton,
and his prominence in the public sphere. Nicolas Fréry
(Strasbourg), concluded the series with a presentation
of a new edition of Voltaire’s hitherto unpublished
correspondence with his niece, Marie-Louise Denis.
10 | VOLTAIRE FOUNDATION ANNUAL REPORT 2022/23