Sam Bailey has just received an MSt in European Enlightenment studies from the University of Oxford with a distinction and won the Gerard Davis prize for his MSt dissertation. He is working at the Vf as a research assistant over the summer. In the coming academic year, he will begin an AHRC-funded PhD on representations of disability in seventeenth-century French cabaret poetry at the University of Durham.

Paul Desforges-Maillard, by Pieter Tanjé, 1756.

It is for good reason that the Republic of Letters is often referred to as a social network. A quick browse of the Electronic Enlightenment project reveals how seamlessly the lengthy written exchanges between the philosophes can be repurposed for digital publication. Indeed, the letters themselves, with their perplexing in-jokes, abbreviations and allusions, seem to invite the various cross-references and hyperlinks that can be added when publishing electronically. So strong are these parallels, that a recent…

‘The Contrast, 1793…’ , engraving by Rowlandson, following Lord George Murphy (1793, pub. by S.W. Fores, London). Source gallica.bnf.fr / BnF.

The concepts of ‘crisis’ and ‘apocalypse’ have reappeared rather abruptly on our secularized horizons, yet they have never been completely absent: merely, one could argue, in retreat from our prevailing belief in ‘progress’. From meditations on a ‘last man’ in Victorian England to Günther Anders’ writings on the nuclear threat in the 1950s, from eighteenth-century literature on ruins to ISIS today, these themes seem to be inextricably bound up with Modernity and our experience of it.

‘Crisis, extremes and apocalypse’ is a new research network at the University of Oxford that seeks to shed light on and engage with themes that are more timely than ever. Indeed, these themes have a long history and include events from the French Revolutionary period. After hosting a workshop on…

Title page of the first edition of L’Ingénu.

Electronic Enlightenment (EE), an online collection of edited correspondence from the early modern period, has been an invaluable resource for me as a first-year modern languages student at Durham University. As part of the Reading French Literature module I have been studying my first work by Voltaire, the satirical novella L’Ingénu, and have used EE to explore Voltaire’s correspondence, pursuing my intuitive hunches about this text as well as finding out more about the context in which it was written.

Religion struck me as one of the main topics of discussion in L’Ingénu. In reading letters to and from Voltaire on EE, I began to better appreciate the extent of religious contention in eighteenth-century France. The theory of Creation is referenced in a seemingly poignant moment at the end of chapter 13, where l’Ingénu is touched by the sight…

This spring, the Voltaire Foundation showcased its publications at the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. One of those staffing the VF book stand was Evan Casey, a graduate student in History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Here, Evan recounts her first-time experience of ASECS.

Downtown Minneapolis.

As a history student working primarily on twentieth-century America I felt a bit of an interloper at an event for eighteenth-century scholars. However, I found that while I may have been out of my primary research period, I was not out of my methodical or theoretical comfort zone. I enjoyed participating in the graduate and women’s caucus luncheons, as well as the Voltaire Foundation’s cocktail and dessert party (which drew over 80 ASECS attendees to the suite of retiring executive director Byron Wells), the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenmenteditorial board’s working dinner, and…