Amazons and Apprentices: Women and the German Parnassus in the Early Enlightenment

For a brief time in the eighteenth century, Johann Christoph Gottsched and his circle – including prominently his wife, Luise Adelgunde Victoria Gottsched, nee Kulmus – dominated efforts to construct a German culture sophisticated enough to rival the French. In the 1730s they attempted to codify the grammar and spelling of written German, elevate German literature, refine cultural practices and taste, and introduce enlightened ideas. Gottsched’s effortsto involve women in this process have been noted, but in Amazons and Apprentices, Katherine Goodman examines for the first time the Gottsched circle’s intitiatives regarding intellectual women in the context of the broaderdiscourse of which they were an important part. She presents an array of voices and texts from 1715 to 1740, including dictionaries, moral weeklies, letters, translations and literature. The book focuses mainly on two women – Christiane Mariane von Ziegler and Luise Gottsched – and the web of cultural meaning each of them activated through her deeds and words. Katherine R. Goodman is professor of German at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.She is the author of Dis/Closures: Women’s Autobiography in Germany 1790-1914, and has edited a number of books on German women writers.