Playing with Devotional Dolls In the fourteenth century, nuns in the Rheinland, Germany, played with dolls as a practice of venerating the infant Jesus. Not only do descriptions of these devotional dolls exist, some of the dolls and their accessories have survived.249 A small trove of these treasures belongs to the Cistercian convent of the Holy Cross in Rostock in northeastern Germany, which owns as many as seven “Poppen” or in modern German “Puppen” or dolls.
