Ever Since Childhood Gottsched had felt drawn to books on philosophy above all others (or so she claimed, as noted above, in the preface to her Triumph der Weltweisheit). Certainly her library shelves must have bulged under the weight of thinkers ancient and modern, from Plato and Seneca to Hobbes, Pascal, Locke, and Malebranche. Her enduring interest in philosophy has been little explored; her translations in this field are squarely dismissed by Veronica C. Richel as being “executed with competence and [requiring] no further comment.” Yet this does not take account of the fact that “philosophy” was transforming Europe during Gottsched’s lifetime; Europe was awash with new ideas, causing widespread excitement, alarm, and upheaval.

During the course of the seventeenth century the foundations of intellectual thought had been shaken by new ideas put forward by scientists and thinkers such as Galileo and Descartes. They were developing a new, mechanistic view of the universe — based on their observations of the stars, geometrical bodies, and the laws of motion — that led to a rethinking of fundamental concepts such as the nature of the soul, creation, and God himself. A “New Philosophy” was emerging to challenge the Aristotelian scholasticism that had set the tone in European thought since the late Middle Ages. Modern thinkers were developing a scientific, rational approach to the major questions of existence, thus seriously unsettling the religious worldview that had dominated in Europe for centuries and raising disturbing questions about the nature of Europe’s cultures, traditions, and institutions. As the intellectual historian Jonathan Israel puts it, the period 1650–1750 saw a

Israel argues that the period constitutes “one of the most important shifts in the history of man,” an age of cultural transformation more significant even than the Renaissance or the Reformation that shook up not just Western civilization, but made its impact felt on the global stage.