How to use this site
Welcome to Oxford University Voltaire, part of Oxford University Enlightenment Editions. We hope you enjoy using the resource.
There are lots of ways to get started.
Search
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).
Explore
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, as well as the site ‘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.
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).
