The Voltaire Foundation is a world leader for eighteenth-century scholarship, publishing the definitive edition of the Complete Works of Voltaire (Œuvres complètes de Voltaire), as well as Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment (previously SVEC), the foremost series devoted to Enlightenment studies, and the correspondences of several key French thinkers.
Unmasking Aliases: A New Way to Find Hidden Identities in the Tudor State Papers
Voltaire Foundation Annual Digital Enlightenment Studies Lecture: Ruth Ahnert on Unmasking Aliases: A New Way to Find Hidden Identities in the Tudor State Papers This paper will introduce a new network-based method for identifying aliases in early modern correspondence. Espionage and conspiracy alike relied upon proliferating pseudonyms, shared personae, and carefully segmented channels of communication — deliberately fragmenting the evidence, and thereby the historical archives we have available to us today. While scholars have painstakingly attributed individual aliases, the absence of a systematic framework has limited our ability to assess competing identifications or to see how resolving one identity reshapes the wider network. The paper proposes a neighbourhood-based, pairwise prediction method that detects structurally plausible alias matches within correspondence networks. Crucially, these predictions are not treated as conclusions but as prompts for archival testing through palaeography, packet structure, internal textual “seepages,” and external testimony. The paper will outline the underlying concept for the method, how it works, and some of the cases it allows us to examine.
15 May 2025
Books as Objects, Data and Meaning: A Computational Approach to Eighteenth-Century Book and Intellectual History
Annual Voltaire Foundation Lecture on Digital Enlightenment Studies: Mikko Tolonen on Books as Objects, Data and Meaning: A Computational Approach to Eighteenth-Century Book and Intellectual History In this lecture, I will present a framework developed by the Helsinki Computational History Group and implemented together with its partners for investigating eighteenth-century book and intellectual history through three interconnected lenses: Books as Objects, Books as Data and Books as Meaning.
We treat bibliographical detail as a key factor for understanding the flow of ideas, examining also the physical attributes of books including the ornaments embedded within them. Using a dedicated machine learning pipeline, we automatically extract and categorize these ornaments at scale from the ECCO corpus, then integrate the results with bibliographical metadata. This approach enables us to trace publishing practices and how books circulated and transformed within the broader distribution of intellectual traditions, thus shedding new light on the activities of publishers and printers, such as Jacob Tonson and John Watts.
We also approach Books as Data by leveraging computational methods for text reuse, translation mining and cross-lingual investigation for reception studies—particularly focusing on English, Scottish and French Enlightenment corpora drawn from ECCO and Gallica. These pipelines illuminate textual overlaps and uncover patterns of influence, offering insights into large-scale cultural and historical questions—for instance, the eighteenth-century reception of David Hume’s essays—and providing the means to reevaluate fundamental issues such as the boundaries of translations.
Finally, we turn to Books as Meaning by applying cutting-edge large-language models. Through “meaning matching”, we not only quantify textual overlaps but also track how semantic content evolves over time, capturing cultural shifts once considered out of reach for computational study. By combining physical features of the books, computational workflows and interpretive practices, this threefold perspective—object, data, meaning—expands our capacity to analyze and reconstruct the multifaceted history of books, authors and ideas in the eighteenth century.
10 May 2024
The Poetics of Text Reuse
The Poetics of Text Reuse: Digital Intertextuality in the Eighteenth-century Archive First Annual Voltaire Foundation Lecture on Digital Enlightenment Studies
Glenn Roe (Sorbonne University & University of Oxford)
The Poetics of Text Reuse: Digital Intertextuality in the Eighteenth-century Archive
14 Nov 2023
Hegel's Enlightenment
Professor Richard Bourke delivers the 2023 Annual Besterman Lecture. Hegel described philosophy as its own time comprehended in thought. For him, that meant understanding the Enlightenment and its aftermath. Examining what the Enlightenment meant for Hegel involves separating its generic meaning as an historical process from its specific sense as a determinate period and its still narrower significance as a canon of thinkers. In the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel depicted the Enlightenment era as a struggle between Reason and Faith. This was a stage in a longer development, the passage from rudeness to refinement, which might itself be depicted in terms of gradual enlightenment. As Hegel saw it, the latest episode in the world-historical drama bred crisis, a collision between human values and the conditions of existence. For Hegel, among the most resourceful responses to this situation came from Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Jacobi. However, resourcefulness did not entail success. The lecture will reconstruct Hegel’s thought in terms of his analysis of how these philosophers failed to reconcile rational inquiry with the content of belief.
21 Nov 2019
Rule-Mania in Enlightenment Paris
Professor Lorraine Daston delivers the 2019 Besterman Lecture By the late seventeenth century, Western Europe’s metropolises were in competition with each other to straighten, illuminate, sanitize, broaden, and above all order their thoroughfares, granting the police enormous power. After the creation of the office of the Paris Lieutenant de Police in 1667, the Parisian police became the avant garde of the French absolutist bureaucracy, admired and feared throughout Europe. The sheer scope and detail of these regulations is staggering: they represent a heroic effort to anticipate, counter, and regulate every possible affront to public safety and good order. It is within this context that a new kind of rule emerges: the rule so certain of its universality, so confident of its foresight, that its enforcement excludes the possibility of adjustment to particular cases.
23 Nov 2018
Writing Rights in 1789
Keith M Baker, professor of Early Modern European History at Stanford University, explains a Digital Humanities project mapping the debates on the constituent articles of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. What happened to rights in 1789? I plan to present in this lecture some results of a collaborative research project exploring this question. Digital Humanities has done remarkable work to reveal the diffusion of texts, the circulation of letters, and the distribution of writers across enlightened Europe. In this regard, its model has tended toward the sociological and dispersive. What might be done, though, with a more political and concentrated approach that would try to digitize decisions and visualize moments of collective choice? What, more specifically, might we learn about the writing of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, that portal to the modern political world? Methods of digital humanities aside, there are also good historiographical reasons for looking again at the week of debates in which the National Assembly fixed on that document. The project I will discuss was provoked most immediately by Jonathan Israel's claims that the principles of the French Revolution, particularly as expressed in August 1789 in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, represented a victory for the group of intellectuals he gathers together under the banner of a Radical Enlightenment deriving its ideas and arguments ultimately from materialist philosophy. But it bears also on issues raised by new histories of human rights, for which the character of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen must be crucial for the question of continuity or rupture in the practice of rights talk.
25 Jul 2018
Methusela and the unity of mankind: late Renaissance and early Enlightenment conceptions of time
Martin van Gelderen delivers a talk for the Besterman Lecture 2018
13 Dec 2017
Digital Rhetoric, literae humaniores and Leibniz's dream
Willard McCarty, King's College, London, gives the 2017 Besterman lecture. If the digital computer is to be a 'machine for doing thinking' in the arts and letters, rather than merely a way of automating tasks we already know how to perform, then its constraints and the powers these constraints define need to be understood. This lecture explores those constraints and powers across the three stages of modelling a research problem: its translation into discrete, binary form; manipulation by the machine; and re-translation into scholarly terms.
2 Jun 2017
Adam Smith, Poverty and Famine
A highly critical account of Adam Smith's views on famine, which fail to recognize that you can have starvation in the midst of plenty.
23 Nov 2012
Rousseau's copy of La Lettre à d'Alembert
Short podcast looking at Enlightenment philosopher Rousseau's copy of La Lettre à d'Alembert, housed in the Bodleian Library.
23 Nov 2012
Rousseau: Archive et Invention.
Professor Nathalie Ferrand (École Normale Supérieure Paris) gives the 2012 Besterman Lecture for the Voltaire Foundation. This lecture is in French.
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