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.

Oxford University Voltaire (OV) is a ground-breaking online resource which provides the best scholarly edition of the works of Voltaire. We have transformed our monumental print edition (205 volumes, published between 1968 and 2022) into a digital edition which can take Voltaire’s writings to wider and more diverse audiences than has ever before been possible. The new platform, with fully bilingual interface in French and English, is a powerful resource that will facilitate new research – and new kinds of research – and also a model of digital scholarly editing and publishing, rethinking the possibilities of the digital medium as a research tool.

The digitisation of the 205 printed volumes has represented a whole range of complex challenges, and we have worked closely with our developer partners Open Creative Communications and our digital consultant Dan Barker (dancan Ltd) to build the data model and user platform. Each work by Voltaire contains:

• a scholarly introduction, with a list of manuscripts and editions;
• Voltaire’s own text, which can involve footnotes and sidenotes;
• variant readings from the different manuscripts and printed sources showing the evolution of each work;
• editorial explanatory notes.

The connections between these elements are numerous and intricate, and OV has sought to capture this interplay in a clear and intuitive manner, allowing users to explore the content in ways that have never before been possible. For example, the full corpus of Voltaire’s work and its editorial apparatus can now be searched both together or separately, with sophisticated filtering tools allowing users to explore the results of those searches in a range of different ways. Metadata is being captured by specialist editors using a bespoke TEI-XML mark-up process, allowing the edition to benefit from both internal and external linking. This is an ongoing process, and the more content we mark up, the larger and richer the resource’s compendium of people, places and events grows. Each of these entities is given its own page, which captures the available information about it in the resource, whether that be places where it is mentioned by Voltaire or where it features in an editor’s critical apparatus.

What kinds of new research can be done using this resource? The ability to search the scholarly apparatus is one such innovation: it is now possible to investigate Voltaire’s use of (for example) wordplay by searching for phrases such as ‘jeu(x) de mots’ and ‘wordplay’/‘play on words’ in the editorial introductions and notes, which provides a useful starting point with about 80 results.

Another handy feature is the ability to filter variant readings, which allow users to trace the evolution of Voltaire’s text. Some works were modified so much that navigating the variants can be daunting and/or confusing, even for seasoned voltairistes, since there is always the risk of overlooking something important in a wood-and-trees scenario. Take the tragedy, Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le prophète, which has a profusion of manuscripts and editions with variant readings: with the ‘Filter variants’ tool one can choose to look only at the variants from one of these. Filtering for MS8, an actor’s copy, in the example shown reveals a stage direction that reflects a contemporary performance.

Unlike the archive print edition which it replaces, OV can be enriched and updated, allowing us to continue adding to the corpus when new discoveries are made. Hundreds of letters have already emerged since the publication of the print correspondence (1968-1977) which are being added to the platform, and more will surely follow. We will also be able to supplement bibliographies and add further editorial commentary to take account of recent scholarship, not least that enabled by the print volumes themselves. We encourage researchers to submit their own findings to us so that we can incorporate them into the resource, making OV a key hub for all Voltaire scholarship.

We are excited to give librarians interested in subscribing to OV the chance to try it out for themselves before launch. Please contact Ellen Appleton at Liverpool University Press for details of how you can take part in this free trial.

Alison Oliver and Gillian Pink, the Voltaire Foundation.

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