How to use this site

If you have a particular term or phrase that you would like to try and find in Voltaire’s works, you can use the search facility. There are various ways of narrowing down results using the tools to restrict findings to an exact phrase, or to find words within the same sentence. It is also possible to exclude terms from the search by entering them into the ‘Exclude’ box.

Results from Voltaire’s works can be filtered via a faceted search, enabling hits from a particular work or year to be visible or excluded. It is also possible to search for results only in Voltaire’s work (by selecting ‘text type: works’) or only in the editorial material, such as introductions and editorial notes (by selecting ‘text type: editorial’). Results can also be narrowed down by genre or by language (the latter useful in cases where a word might have a meaning in more than one language, enabling the user to view only those in the language of immediate interest).

Search results within letters can be filtered according to sender, recipient, send date, or identifier (traditionally D number, now called OVD number, as more letters will be added to the corpus in future updates).

If you have an interest in a particular work, clicking on ‘Explore’ in the site header, then ‘Work’, will take you to a full list of titles. You can begin to type the title, or a key word from the title, into the box to find it in the list. The list can also be searched or sorted by date.

The ‘Explore’ function also allows Voltaire’s correspondence (‘Letters’) to be browsed and filtered in ways that are appropriate to the material, such as more granular date options, and names of senders and recipients. The correspondence appendices have a separate ‘Explore’ section, and can be browsed by date or by D.app number.

The marginalia can also be accessed via the ‘Explore’ function. The works on which Voltaire commented or which show signs of his reading are listed in a table which can be filtered or sorted according to author, title or the number attributed to the work in the Corpus des notes marginales (CN no.).

Users can also use the ‘Explore’ function to browse the ‘Compendium’, which contains entries for named entities (people, places and events) and links to the works in which they have been identified in our data. This work of identification is done manually by specialist editors and is a work in progress.