This essay's title pays playful tribute to Sasha Roberts's ground-breaking 1998 work on Shakespeare (who creepes into the womens closets about bedtime) in which she investigates the spaces where women read Venus and Adonis.1 Here, though, I focus on the reading conditions of English nuns living in enclosed convents in or near Antwerp during the period from 1619 until 1794 when they returned to England, considering what they read and where as well as the effects of those conditions on their reception of particular texts.From the nuns' accounts, I find no evidence of activity like that alleged in 1623 by Thomas Robinson in his supposed expose of the English Brigittine community in Lisbon into which he claimed the confessor introduced obscene literature: there are few idle Pamphlets printed in England which he hath not in the house.2 This reading precisely located in the 'dark' privacy of the bedchamber late in the evening, after supper, behind closed doors (Roberts 39). In Antwerp, it mostly takes place within the community and follows prescribed book lists. If that sounds less potentially enticing, bedroom reading of a kind is mentioned. One asthmatic nun is said to have read saints' lives at night since she was unable to lie down without being ready to stifle with violen[t] oppression. Her lungs making a noise exactly lik[e] a pare of Bag Pipes (A2, 297).One particular book in the convent is especially intriguing in the context of Robinson's aspersions. The preface to a 1670 edition of Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love asks the reader to afford Her a place in your Closet (Cressy, Dedicatory Letter). I wish to examine the implications of that request for our understanding of reading in a same-sex community, and by doing so I am able to draw some wider inferences about female religious closets in the early modern period, situating this understanding within the debate about Catholicism and nationhood.3 I also consider the reception of Philip Sidney's Arcadia by one nun who, having enjoyed the book as a young woman, later rejected it: I explore the consequences of sequential reading, the after-life of books as well as readers, to investigate why one book might be received into the convent while another was refused.First, we need to consider the kind of spaces available in the convent and the meaning of in such a setting. Cultural historians have long associated ideas of personal space, including that of the body itself, with subjectivity. Nascent interiority of the early modern period has often been linked with changes to domestic privacy, with the closet seen as a space of potential solitude and personal re-creation. Mary Thomas Crane has shown that, in fact, privacy was more often to be found outside the house, where an ecological selfhood was shaped within a larger physical environment. Such studies complicate assumptions about the gendering of separate spheres. An examination of the living conditions of English nuns also adds to the intricacy of interpretation. These were women who lived outside the home, in enclosures of a different kind, semi-autonomous, in exile from their homeland during periods of persecution, pursuing a communal, contemplative resolve. The way nuns are spatially envisaged is due in part to antagonistic polemic, Robinson's included, in which convents were represented as prisons where reluctantly encloistered women were in thrall to devious priests. Our understanding of privacy in such contexts needs to be extrapolated from this prevailing propaganda and from the nuns' own idealized accounts in which their convents are often represented as expatriate havens.Notwithstanding the complexity of interpreting competing views surrounding religious women, the nuns' records show their own clear experience of spaces, discernible beyond the more rhetorical tropisms. They also reveal evidence about the conception of their own bodies as both spaces in themselves and as experienced within their surroundings. …