Frequently asked questions

Access to the platform is currently limited. If you have an individual login or if your institution has signed up, you can sign in here.

To arrange a free trial of Oxford University Voltaire for your library, please contact Ellen Appleton at Ellen.Appleton@liverpool.ac.uk.

If your credentials no longer work, please contact the person who provided your access to the platform.

There are plans to add translations of introductions and other secondary material in future updates. As far as Voltaire’s works are concerned, only translations in which he is known or believed to have been involved are available, most notably his Essay on epick poetry, Letters concerning the English nation and Saggio intorno ai cambiamenti avvenuti su’l globo della terra.

In-line diagrams that are part of Voltaire’s text appear in the text where they exist; however other illustrations from the print edition are not visible at present due to copyright considerations. We hope to be able to make them progressively available in the course of future updates.

You can read our short biography of Voltaire as well as the Voltaire Foundation’s set of pages about his writings. We’ve also brought together some key works under selected themes, we feature a new text periodically.

Go to the search page and select ‘Date’ in the left-hand filter menu. You can choose whether to select dates of ‘Composition’, ‘Circulation’ or ‘Publication’ (or just leave the filter set to ‘Default’, which is the date that best represents what is known about each work’s history). Either type a range of dates into the boxes provided, or select a single year using the list. This can be sorted either by number of hits, or in chronological (or reverse chronological) order by clicking ‘Hits’ and ‘Year’ at the top of the list.

Click on the ’Find by reference’ button at the right hand of the site header. Select an option according to whether your reference is for a volume and page number, a letter or a correspondence appendix. Enter the volume and page number, ‘D’ number or ‘D.app’ number, and you’ll be taken straight to the right place.

If you go to the page or work indicated, you can turn on the line numbering by clicking on the symbol in the bottom toolbar. Just navigate to the right line number using either the arrow buttons on the bottom right, or by scrolling. If not entering a precise reference, in longer works you may need to navigate to the right chapter or article, which you can do using the table of contents on the left-hand side within longer works.

The digitised resource has been designed to be centred around individual works – while retaining links to anything in the volume, or associated volumes, that pertains to it, such as volume prefaces. The volume as a unit has therefore only been retained for the purposes of finding a given reference.

Access to variant readings to Voltaire’s text can be turned on and off by clicking the button in the bottom toolbar within a work.

The search program will find all instances of a given search term. If you wish to exclude a particular text from the results, you can do this using the faceted search facility. Click on ’work’ on the left-hand side, and then on the block symbol next to the work you wish to exclude. The title will appear under ’excluding’ under the list of titles. You can still see the number of times the search term appears in this work, and if you wish to include it again, just click the add_circle button next to it.

Once you have accessed the work that interests you, use the radio button at the top of the screen to switch between ‘Introduction’ (Editorial introduction) and ‘Work’ (Voltaire’s text). From the ‘Work overview page’, users can click to read the ‘Introduction’ and ‘Work’ using the relevant buttons.

In general we recommend using the format: Voltaire, Title of work, ed. [editor’s name] (DOI [doi]) in Oxford University Voltaire, 2026 (v.1.0 accessed on [date accessed]). You can generate a citation including a DOI, as well as the volume and page number of the print edition of the Complete works of Voltaire/Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, by clicking the button at the bottom of the screen in work view.

We are always grateful to hear of any errors detected by readers (or any other comments). You can let us know of any by clicking on the ‘Provide feedback’ button in the bottom toolbar, completing the form and sending the message.

The content of OV is currently the same as the print edition, although we have corrected some straightforward typographical errors, and illustrations are not available online at present. In time, however, we will be updating OV in various ways, from correcting more typos and other small errors to large-scale revisions of some of the older editions. The print edition remains an extraordinarily rich scholarly resource, but in some places OV will eventually be more up-to-date. Significant revisions will be flagged as such so that users will know when what they are reading has superseded earlier content, and it will always be possible to see the earlier version.

Many works by Voltaire have clear-cut dates of composition and publication (which often fall in the same year). Others were written over a long period of time, or may not have been published immediately, or even in his lifetime. Others still are impossible to date. We have identified composition date, circulation date and print publication date as accurately as possible for each work, and these can be seen on the work page. For the purposes of searching and browsing, specialist editors have chosen the date (or range of dates) that best reflects what is known of the history of the particular text: this is the ’default date’. In some cases there is a subjective component to that choice.

The division of an author’s life’s work into 205 volumes is necessarily to some extent arbitrary. The Oxford print edition was arranged (more or less) chronologically according to ’date of substantial composition’, and older editions were often organised by literary genre. We decided it was best to let readers decide how they wish to approach the works, whether through genre, date, or other search criteria.