The Closet : Princeton University Press : 9780691198231 : 0691198233 : 15 May 2020 : "In early modern English interior design, closets provided royalty with secluded places for reading, writing, and storing valuables, as well as for nurturing the shifting alliances on which the politics of the day depended. Admission to the closet was contingent solely on the owner's approval, and the criteria for admission were necessarily opaque. Later, in the houses of nobility and, increasingly, those of the middle class, private rooms served as prayer closets, curiosity cabinets, dressing rooms, libraries, galleries, and impromptu bedrooms. Merging with the privy and the bath, they were remade as earth closets or water closets and bathing closets. In these new iterations, closets remained important spaces where physical closeness or the exchange of knowledge, or both, could take place. The Closet proposes that the closet's material proliferation had a distinctive relationship to literature. Drawin