News and updates

September 2026:

The largest set of content that has been added for our autumn launch is Voltaire’s marginalia. About half his personal library of approximately 7000 volumes contains notes, lines, symbols, scratches, paper markers, dog-eared pages and so on, all traces of his reading and working practices. These have now been digitised for the first time and can be accessed via the Explore function, by following a specific volume and page reference or by navigating to the ‘Marginalia’ tab in search results.

Additional content has also been added to the correspondence, including all 504 appendices and 15 letters with full scholarly annotation by Nicholas Cronk.

We are also pleased to launch the Open Access component of the resource, Open Voltaire. The first database, now live, is Voltaire Iconography, created by Sofya Dmitrieva based on work by Professor Samuel Taylor.

If you are interested in a trial or a subscription, please contact our partners at Liverpool University Press.

June 2026:

An interactive timeline is now available for users exploring the correspondence, as well as a button to allow easy browsing of the exchange of letters between two people.

January 2026:

As of the end of 2025, we have launched the first full version of Oxford University Voltaire!

This edition contains all of Voltaire's published works and notebooks, along with his correspondence, making it the most complete online resource for his writings anywhere. They can be explored using search and browse functionalities (including faceted searching), and through a compendium giving a selection of entities defined in our metadata (e.g. people and places).

Later in 2026, the critical edition of Voltaire's marginalia will be added to the site, enabling users to explore the notes he left in the volumes of his personal library and other evidence of his reading.