Project description
Tracing Voltaire’s influence across Enlightenment Europe
Although Voltaire was an influential figure of the Enlightenment, little is known about how his writings and ideas spread across Europe and shaped intellectual debates in different languages and cultures. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Programme, the VoICE project will analyse large multilingual collections of texts in French, English, Italian and Spanish. It will identify direct quotations, translated reuses and conceptual similarities linked to Voltaire’s work, and examine how women writers engaged with and adapted his ideas. The project’s goal is to gain a better understanding of the circulation of Enlightenment thought, the emergence of literary celebrity and the creation of a shared European intellectual culture.
Objective
"Voltaire was one of the most prominent public figures of 18th-century Europe. But how can we measure the dissemination of his texts and his influence on contemporary debates? VoICE uses Digital Humanities tools to trace intertextual reuses of Voltaire’s writings across a multilingual Western European corpus (French, English, Italian, Spanish).
To date, no large-scale formal study has examined the direct and indirect reuse of an Enlightenment author’s works across such extensive corpora. VoICE will help define a first “trans-European” corpus of 18th-century texts and provide a reusable framework for future research on other authors and traditions.
The project evaluates Voltaire’s presence in Enlightenment texts and how these reuses enhanced his reputation and contributed to a shared intellectual horizon. It is structured around three axes:
– ""Voltaire in French"", identifying direct citations;
– ""Voltaire in Translation"", analyzing reuse in translated form;
– ""Voltaire’s Concepts"", detecting restatements of his ideas via semantic similarity.
Each axis will also explore how women writers engaged with Voltaire’s work, incorporating it into their intellectual production and using it to assert cultural authority in a male-dominated world.
For the first two axes, sequence alignment software will detect textual parallels; for the third, LLMs will identify conceptual proximity between excerpts.
At the crossroads of literary studies, digital humanities, and cultural history, VoICE sheds new light on the diffusion of Voltaire’s ideas—and more broadly, those of the ""philosophes""—across Enlightenment Europe. It also investigates early mechanisms of literary celebrity, with citations of Voltaire helping to shape a transnational media space."
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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OX1 2JD Oxford
United Kingdom
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