Far from being a conservative figure in the medieval and early modern imaginary, the enclosed woman religious challenged contemporary notions of properly disciplined female sexuality. This course examines the conceptual utility of nuns and their architectural enclosures—convents—in literary texts that seek to imagine intimacies, kinship structures, and ways of being in the world not reducible to heterosexual domesticity. Taking a long view of female religious enclosure, we will look for the roots of its subversive potential in the queer eroticism of medieval anchoritic texts, track its radical ideological unmooring in English literature written after the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1539–1542), and trace its intersection with emergent ideologies of race in the convents of the New World. While we will read texts written by and for enclosed women religious, we will also attend to how the figure of the nun surfaces, sometimes obliquely, in a wide variety of genres and modes (the country house poem, the closet drama, complaint, etc.). In our analysis of the fantasies animated by female religious enclosure, we will consider how the operation of the nun and the nunnery in premodern texts speaks to modern theoretical approaches to gender, sexuality, religion, and race.