Women translators in the Sprachgesellschaften

This article examines the activities of female translators in four seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century language societies: the Académie des Loyales, the Tugendliche Gesellschaft, the Pegnesische Blumenorden and the Leipzig DeutscheGesellschaft. The language societies constituted a rare space for women to become involved in intellectual life at this time. The women worked on a range of material from Italian and French (literature, devotional works, moral philosophy), sometimes engaging with the source texts in surprisingly creative ways. They played an important part in the movement to regenerate cultural life in the German states and, towards the end of the period, helped to win acceptance for the new public phenomenon of the literary woman.