This Study Has Sought to demonstrate why Luise Gottsched’s activities as a translator — often deemed less interesting than her achievements as a playwright and frequently neglected by critics — deserve our attention. Taking its lead from the literary and cultural historians who have recently been rethinking translation as a profoundly significant cultural process, the book offers the first comprehensive survey of Gottsched’s translations and places them within the context of eighteenth-century intellectual, literary, and cultural history. We have seen that Gottsched threw herself into this wide-ranging and challenging work, rendering texts from French, English, Latin, and Greek into German across an impressive array of disciplines. Indeed, her translations were part of an ambitious and progressive program that helped to shape German culture during the Enlightenment.

Chapter 1 looked in detail at the circumstances in which Gottsched produced her translations. Research on female translators in other European countries has often suggested a link between gender and translation: women through the ages have engaged in translation as a second-rate, humble activity suitable to their sex, even if they have sometimes appropriated the “mask” of translator to assert their own agency and develop publishing careers. The situation in seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century Germany was different, however. Germany in this era was undergoing a radical process of modernization and reorientation, and it was widely believed that translation had a crucial role to play in introducing new enlightened thought from abroad and bringing about cultural renewal. A number of privileged women were able to engage in this highly valued activity — most energetically of all, Luise Gottsched. Gottsched’s marriage gave her access to cosmopolitan, scholarly circles in the cultural center of Leipzig. Working alongside her professor husband and other collaborators, she seems to have taken her translating very seriously and to have had little sense that her opportunities were limited on account of her sex.

Chapter 2 focused on Gottsched’s translations in the field of philosophy and religion, where her output included contributions to landmark German editions of Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (4 vols., 1702) and Leibniz’s Essais de Théodicée (1710), as well as translations of works by lesser-known figures such as Jean Terrasson, Louis de Beausobre, and John Eachard. Her work in this field was avant-garde, sometimes surprisingly bold, and had far-reaching ramifications.