In October 1757 Frederick the Great of Prussia visited Leipzig, a city occupied by his troops throughout most of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), and held a series of private audiences with the famous professor Johann Christoph Gottsched. The very first thing the king wanted to know from the professor was whether his wife had really translated Pierre Bayle, presumably referring to Bayle’s landmark Dictionnaire historique et critique. At the second audience the king bombarded him with more questions about Mrs. Gottsched: “Was hat seine Frau sonst geschrieben? Machet sie auch Verse? Kann sie auch Briefe schreiben? Schreibt sie auch französisch? Kann sie auch Latein? Kann sie auch griechisch? Ich möchte wohl was von ihren Sachen sehen. Bringe er mir etwas von allem mit.” Johann Christoph obediently returned the next day with samples of his wife’s work. He had with him two translations: Der Lockenraub, a version of Alexander Pope’s mock-epic poem The Rape of the Lock, and Zwo Schriften, Das Maaß der lebendigen Kräften betreffend, some letters on the force of bodies in motion by the French scientists Emilie du Châtelet and Jean-Jacques Dortous de Mairan. Johann Christoph seems to have felt that his wife’s translations would best represent her achievements and would most interest and impress the king.

Today Luise Adelgunde Victorie Gottsched, née Kulmus (1713–62), is known primarily as a dramatist rather than a translator. She is recognized as one of Germany’s most significant early women of letters, but critics usually focus on her work in comedy and tragedy. She published a handful of comedies, which are considered important for the development of the genre in Germany, and one tragedy, which is thought to be the first ever penned by a German woman. Her plays are much more readily available to the modern reader than her translations, many of which were never reprinted after the eighteenth century. Yet Gottsched was first and foremost a translator. She devoted most of her life to translation and produced or contributed to over fifty volumes of translations in total, many of these several hundred pages long. She turned her hand chiefly to contemporary French and English works, rendering texts into German across an extraordinary range of genres and disciplines, from poetry and drama to philosophy, history, archaeology, and theoretical physics.