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This article examines the activities of female translators in four seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century language societies: the Acad?mie des Loyales, the Tugendliche Gesellschaft, the Pegnesische Blumenorden and the Leipzig Deutsche Gesellschaft. 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.
Women in the early modern period certainly struggled to make their mark on literary life. Among the rare institutions which encouraged women to engage in literary pursuits were the Sprachgesellschaften, the language academies which sprung up from the early seventeenth century and which aimed to improve the moral well-being of the nation by cultivating the German language and German literature. Women's involvement in the Sprachgesellschaften has not been fully researched. To date, there has been only one article devoted entirely to the subject ? by Karl F. Otto ? and he concludes his short survey by stating that further studies are "dringend notwendig".2 Other critics discussing female members of the societies tend to focus on the 'original' literary works they produced rather than their translations.3 And yet translation was central to the activities of the Sprachgesellschaften. Translation was viewed as a fundamental part of the attempts to improve and refine the German language, and as invaluable training for a new generation of German writers. Indeed, translations were valued almost as highly as original works (as Georg Phillip Harsd?rffer, co-founder of the Pegnesische Blumenorden, put it: "Es ist fast so l?blich eine Sache wol ?bersetzen / als selbsten aus eigenem Gehirne etwas zu Papier bringen"4), and it is now generally agreed that the long-term impact of the language academies lay above all in the field of translation.5 This article will examine in detail the role of women as translators in the language academies. It will build on existing research ? such as information which has come to light over the years with...