Staging virtue: Women, death, and liberty in Elise Reimarus's Cato

Elise Reimarus was among the leading women intellectuals of eighteenth-century Hamburg. Rarely acknowledged today, her surviving writings contribute to central literary and philosophical debates in Europe at the time. This paper traces Reimarus s intervention in controversy surrounding Joseph Addison s tragedy Cato (1713) and its dramatization of republican liberty and virtue. Long erased from the literary canon, Reimarus s German translation and adaptation (ca. 1776) radicalizes Addison s critique of Cato s Stoic leadership style. By rewriting the love-plots and foregrounding the women characters private lives, her Cato engenders an alternative art of politics -one that steers a consequentialist path toward the common good. ? by Journal of the History of Ideas.