This dissertation investigates female editors and German-language periodicals between 1740 and 1920. More specifically, I explore how female editors strategically employ emotions to create transnational networks and shape their position in the public sphere throughout different centuries. To this end, I coin the term “emotional network”, with which I define any form of personal, textual or material exchange which contains, foregrounds or shapes emotions or emotional connections, while at the same time considering their historical specificity. This concept is based on an expertise in actor-network theory and a socio-historical study of emotions to investigate women’s editorship and the German periodical press through different geographical and historical contexts. In this study, I propose that ‘emotional networks’ are the flexible package with which to unfold the dynamics between women editors, periodicals and institutionalized social spaces such as coffeehouses, literary circles or the private home. As a result, this dissertation does not consider ‘emotional networks to be a fixed concept, but rather, it zooms in on the different ways in which women editors employed emotions and networks to achieve agency.This dissertation discusses sixwomen editors and their periodicals which have been underresearched until today: Luise Gottsched (1713-62) and DasNeueste der anmuthigen Gelehrsamkeit(1751-1762) and Die Vernünfige Tadlerinnen (1725-26, 1748),Ernestine Hofmann’s(1752/53-1789)Für Hamburgs Töchter(1779), Charlotte von Hezel’s (1755-1817) Wochenblatt für’s Schöne Geschlecht(1779),Sophie La Roche’s (1730-1807) Pomona (1783-84),Helmina von Chézy’s (1733-1856) Französische Miscellen(1803-1807) and Auguste Fickert (1855-1910), who co-edited Dokumente der Frauen (1899-1902)and was sole editor of Neues Frauenleben (1902-18).This cross-century and cross-national approach will contribute to the field of periodical studies, which has not studied German women editorship and emotional networks in this light before.