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Record W4417155410 · doi:10.1353/hms.2025.a976681

Voltaire’s Review of Hume’s History of England

2025· article· en· W4417155410 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Marc Hanvelt

Bibliographic record

VenueHume studies · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicPhilosophy, History, and Historiography
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsHistoriographyRendering (computer graphics)History of EnglandTranslation studiesHistory of English

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract: This article provides an English translation of Voltaire’s review of David Hume’s History of England . The original French text of the review, which appeared in the May 2, 1764 supplement to La Gazette Littéraire de l’Europe , is also transcribed in full. When Voltaire’s review is mentioned in English-language scholarship, it is usually presented straightforwardly as a glowing appraisal of the History and of Hume as historian. However, a closer examination of the review reveals a more complicated text than has hitherto been generally acknowledged. In fact, there are good reasons to believe that Voltaire had never read the pre-Tudor volumes of Hume’s History when he wrote this review. It is hoped that, by rendering Voltaire’s review accessible to a wider readership, this translation will draw more attention to the text and to its significance in historiographical debates involving two of the eighteenth century’s leading European historians.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.004
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.016
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.014
Threshold uncertainty score0.045

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0040.016
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0100.010
Science and technology studies0.0010.002
Scholarly communication0.0040.003
Open science0.0000.002
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.060
GPT teacher head0.266
Teacher spread0.206 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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