The earliest significant German edition of Molière, published in 1694, was a collection of thirteen comedies which may have been translated – surprisingly – by the devout pietist writer Johanna Eleonora Petersen. This article offers a detailed examination of the collection. It investigates the question of who may have translated the plays, examines the text itself, and shows how the translation played a crucial role in spreading knowledge of Molière among a new bourgeois readership at the beginning of Germany's own golden age of drama .