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. By illuminating the myriad material forms of knowledge and their circulation, the authors define the Enlightenment as a process of invention, repurposing, and reception.

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It is nothing short of astonishing to consider that this year, 2025, represents the 70th anniversary of the collection that we know as Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment. Theodore Besterman, in 1955, established its twin mission, to offer an outlet for original scholarship on 18th-century writing (in his mind, primarily on French writing) and to contribute to the innovations necessary in scholarly publishing.

We are commemorating the anniversary with the publication of our July volume, the 671st in the Studies. Cultural Transmission and the French Enlightenment: Repurposing the Past, edited by Hanna Roman and Olivia Sabee, presents 11 essays by a combination of early career and established scholars of diverse disciplinary backgrounds, whose essays deploy a range of interpretive approaches, from the historical to the textual to feminist to the historiographical. The essays examine the role of Enlightenment in cultural transmission, and of cultural transmission in the Enlightenment. Some explore this concept during the eighteenth century; others reflect on how Enlightenment texts and ideas were transmitted and interpreted in the 20th and 21st centuries. 

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The Studies, more than any other volume or collection published by the Voltaire Foundation, tracks our full institutional and intellectual history. Indeed, the conception and birth of the series paralleled the formation and founding of its predecessor, the Institut et Musée Voltaire (IMV), first conceived by Besterman in 1950, while living in London, having the year prior left his position as director of the Library division of UNESCO to devote himself full time to his work on Voltaire. 

He had initially hoped to produce a bibliography of Voltaire editions and manuscripts, but the project had quickly taken on a new goal, an edition of Voltaire’s “collected correspondence.” Having no actual training or background in the study of Voltaire or the eighteenth century, Besterman had recruited six scholars to form an “International Advisory Committee.” In his first communication to this group, on January 20, 1950, he broached a new idea, a scholarly periodical. He wanted his “search for …manuscript material,” to lead to “something bigger.” He also believed, as he wrote in May of 1950 to André Delattre, there was a need for a new approach to scholarly publishing, “because of the intolerable publications bottle-neck in this country.”  To Norman Torrey, one of the two most prominent academics working on Voltaire in English, he announced, “I have decided to establish a new series” to be entitled “18th-Century French Studies”. ^[1]

The broader title indicated Besterman’s intellectual ambition. While he remained personally interested primarily in the life and works of Voltaire, he considered the larger enterprise to be the study of the 18th century and the Enlightenment. Indeed, in September 1951, he wrote to Bernard Gagnebin, a leading Rousseau scholar, director of the Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Genève, and his liaison to the City of Geneva in establishing the IMV, of his hope to name the new enterprise the “Institut du XVIIIème siècle.” Gagnebin, after conferring with key figures on the municipal Conseil administratif, responded that out of deference to the “prétensions” of Geneva’s already existing Musée Rousseau, he could not. Nevertheless, they agreed, nothing prevented him from naming the periodical he envisioned the “Revue du XVIIIe siècle.” He prefered this title, because “une Revue de l’Institut Voltaire se vendra bien plus difficilement.”^[2]

In April 1952, Besterman wrote to Herbert Dieckmann, the Harvard scholar who had recently discovered previously unpublished Diderot manuscripts, that “if the institute is established, it is my intention to set upon foot a publications policy to enable [scholarly] undertakings … at the expense of the institute and without interference” of commercial concerns. He continued, “The endless talk that goes on about the crisis in learned publication seems to me singularly unprofitable; what is needed is to do something.”^[3]

In early November 1954, Besterman presided at the official opening of the IMV, established in Voltaire’s former residence of Les Délices. Later that same month, he sent to the Clarendon Press in Oxford the typescript for the first volume of what he intended to be the long-discussed new periodical, to be published under the imprint of the Institut. The first copies shipped at the end of March, 1955, and copies began to arrive in research libraries across Europe and North America that summer, bearing the title Travaux sur Voltaire et  le dix-huitième siècle. Torrey responded that he considered the launch “one of the bright spots on the horizon,” in an environment in which “the humanities…in America in general seem to be putting up a losing fight in favor of the physicists and the political scientists.”^[4]

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The seventy year history of the Studies, one can say with confidence, indeed did do something. The series has continued to appear for 70 years as a bilingual, interdisciplinary and international collection. The second volume appeared in 1956 under the English title Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, a title that would be retained for the next 43 years. Besterman continued as editor officially until his passing in 1976, and his bequest to Oxford of his library and estate included a condition ensuring the continuity of the series. Haydn Mason became general editor from the 175th volume, published in 1977; Mason edited the next 150 volumes, over nearly 2 decades. Anthony Strugnell became general editor in 1996 and oversaw several important evolutions – the change of title to SVEC, the standardization of the publication calendar to 12 volumes per year, and the transition from numbering each volume successively (1 – 382), to assigning each volume a number based on the calendar year of publication (beginning 2000:05 in May 2000). Jonathan Mallinson began as general editor with the 420th volume (2003:07); during his 12-year term as editor, he edited 150 volumes. This era saw a significant broadening of the editorial board and of the scope of the collection, culminating in the most recent name change, to the current Oxford University Studies on the Enlightenment, in January 2014.  My own service as general editor is now in its 10th year, and this volume represents the 101st published in that period.

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In more recent years, the Studies has also taken up the challenge set forth by Besterman to move forward what he considered the restrictive business models and formats  of scholarly publishing. In 2018, the Voltaire Foundation entered into a partnership with Liverpool University Press, which has greatly increased the visibility and distribution of the series; it has also made possible the creation of the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment ONLINE digital collection.  We also began, in 2019, the use of the Manifold Scholar publication platform to produce open access digital companions to selected volumes^[5].

As we look forward, we work with an awareness that both the formats for scholarly communication and the values and language of the Enlightenment face stern tests.

Certainly in Geneva in 1955, such concerns existed. Besterman complained regularly of the expectation of commercial publishers that significant editorial projects must be heavily subsidized and well staffed; he and his allies in the mid 1960s complained of reviews that assumed his publications were produced by a “factory” or “machine.” From its start, the Studies has operated with what might be called anachronistically, but justifiably, a start-up culture, at a distance from what one critic called “the Enlightenment industry.”^[6] Such adaptability is a value we expect to carry forward into the future.

As for an ominous political environment, the spirit of international engagement and defense of democratic values has been present from the inception of the series. Besterman had begun his foray into Voltaire scholarship, almost literally, in the embers of the second World War; his prior publishing venture, Guyon House, had ended in 1940 when the printing facilities and inventory were destroyed by a bomb during the Blitz.  He had begun his work on Voltaire within weeks of the liberation of Paris in 1944 and pursued it as a founding staff member at UNESCO; in the early 1950s, he served on the executive council of PEN International. Moreover, his editorial pursuit of both Voltaire manuscripts and new eighteenth-century scholarship depended deeply on the cooperation of foreign ministers of the UK, France and the Soviet Union, and he sent letters directly to Presidents Kennedy and Khrushchev in the early 1960s. And the first Enlightenment Congress in 1963, the proceedings of which were published in the Studies (volumes XXIV-XXVII), explicitly built on a culture of internationalism that could be traced to the Enlightenment Republic of Letters and would be sustained by the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

As a book series, the Studies interprets the texts of the past but, as its history over the past 70 years makes clear, always in light of its purpose in the present and with an eye towards the future.

Gregory Brown

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^[1] IMV MSS 19065; 20 January 1950; IMV MSS C 5764, 31 May 1950; IMV 22849, 31 May 1950.

^[2] IMV 8281-1, 8283, 8284; 14 – 17 September 1951.  Besterman was most likely unaware of the existence of a prior journal, Revue du XVIIIe siècle, published for one year in 1913 by the short-lived Société du XVIIIe siècle. Gustave Lanson chaired the “Comité de publication” for the journal, and Daniel Mornet was Secrétaire général of the Society. The young Julien Cain published his first article in number 3, on eighteenth-century art history.

^[3] IMV C-6937, 2 April 1952.

^[4] Bibliothèque de Genève, Manuscrits IMV, Fonds Besterman (hereafter “IMV MSS”) 22867, 26 November 1954; IMV, MSS 22877, 4 February 1955.

^[5] The digital companions are housed on the LUP instance of Manifold Scholar <https://bit.ly/OSE-Manifold>.

^[6] Peter Gay, “Voltaire,”  New York Review of Books, April 16, 1964; Brendan Gill, “Literary Industry,” New York Review of Books, October 28, 1965; Besterman, “In Response to Edmund Wilson,” December 19, 1968.

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Gregory Brown is the Series Editor for Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment. If you are interested in publishing in this series, please see our series author guide.

New to the series: Cultural transmission and the French Enlightenment, edited by Hanna Roman and Olivia Sabee, illuminates material forms of knowledge and their circulation, defining Enlightenment as invention, repurposing, and reception. Find out more about the book >

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