ABSTRACT
Ironically, given what I intend to say about historical sensibilities, this essay was inspired by the ways in which early modern religious authors, a modern critic, and historians of early modern Europe echo each other. A few years ago, I became aware that certain intellectuals in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Spain were voicing some striking priorities as to how they knew what they knew. Their preferences in turn led me to the phrase "local knowledge," an expression that anthropologist Clifford Geertz coined in 1983 to describe the approach that would best serve the study of alien legal systems, Geertz insisted (a) that the law is always local knowledge as well as placeless principle, and (b) that we cannot understand what our subjects thought they were doing if we only refract them through theory and prescription. 1 To discover cultural meaning in situ, Geertz told us to build from a specific context and the ground up.
