 A variety of circumstances—religious, political, and social—conspired to give women limited opportunities to engage in and with the contemporary intellectual culture, even compared to their French- and English-speaking contemporaries. The German-speaking lands of Europe lacked a major cosmopolitan centre, like London or Paris, to germinate progressive ideas and to propagate those developed abroad. Moreover, the fact that, in spite of Thomasius’ and Wolff’s efforts, German intellectuals continued to publish (and teach) in Latin through the first half of the eighteenth century, meant that women’s access to these ideas remained limited. There were a handful of notable attempts by reformers (including Francke) to redress the general oversight of girls’ education, but by and large their education was a private matter and in any case guided by the traditional conception of women’s threefold Bestimmung as Gattin, Mutter, and Hausfrau (wife, mother, and housewife).