ABSTRACT
In 1606 the Discalced Carmelite nun Ana de San Agustín began penning her spiritual autobiography. This rich text is a treasure-trove of information about life in an early modern convent. Ana writes that she kept an image of the baby Jesus, or a niño Jesús figure, in a box at the revolving window. The decision to keep a fairly elaborate, and precious, sacred object at the convent's point of commerce and contact with the secular world is intriguing, to say the least, and this essay is an attempt to unpack the niño Jesús and its possible meaning for her convent. The presence of the niño Jesús at the torno sheds light on the fraught intersection of material culture, commerce, and enclosure. An examination of this detail of Ana's account prompts an analysis of the cloister that moves beyond the now commonplace assertion that enclosure was oftentimes not normative and even when it was that it was unevenly enforced.
