This article retraces women’s reading practices across the cases of five landgravines of Hesse-Darmstadt from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and of professional writer Sophie von La Roche (1730-1807), in order to show how these practices affected the court and civil society in German-speaking lands. On the one hand, the changes along this historical arc can be understood as part of the secularization process. On the other hand, they can signal failures or successes in women’s integration into the new “literary system”.