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Abstract: What happens when you "tear up, or at least forcefully wrinkle, the Eurocentric map of the early modern World-Ocean," and instead "mark the interrelation between ecological and cultural geographies in ways that are attentive to the interdependence of local and networked perspectives," as editors Jane Degenhardt and Benjamin VanWagoner provocatively advise in their introduction (3)? To judge from this remarkably cogent collection, the paradoxical result is to show how careful attention to the local can simultaneously inform and disrupt larger narratives. I catch myself even as I write this, reluctant to measure the import of these interventions by what they tell us about imperialism in general, or beyond their specific cases. The generalizing or theorizing impulse may unwittingly reinscribe the centrality of a European experience writ large, which is precisely what the issue sets out to disrupt, by "bringing to light absent, suppressed, or unconventional narratives, histories of cultural forms and oceanic relations" (Degenhardt and Ben VanWagoner 3). Yet these contributions manage both to illuminate the contested agencies that operate at sites of cultural and imperial encounter, and how everything from material culture to marriage choices refracts those contestations, while simultaneously offering powerful models for understanding dynamics elsewhere.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Facing Uncertainty in Early Modern Iberia -- 1. Trusting the "I": The Uncertainty of Picaresque Confession in Guzmán de Alfarache -- 2. Feeling Certainty, Performing Sincerity: The Emotional Hermeneutics of Truth in Inquisitorial and Theatrical Practice -- 3. Conflicting Certainties or Different Truths? Healers and Inquisition in Baroque Spain -- 4. True Peste and False Doors: Medical and Legal Discourse during the Great Castilian Plague, 1596–1601 -- 5. Policing Talent in Early Modern Jesuit Rome: Difference, Self-Knowledge, and Career Specialization -- 6. Stolen Saint: Relic Theft and Relic Identification in Seventeenth-Century Rome -- 7. Baptizing "uncertain human beings"? Probabilist Theology and the Question of the Beginning of Human Life in Seventeenth-Century Catholicism -- 8. Truth and Human History in Melchor Cano's De locis theologicis -- 9. Ambivalent Origins: Isaac La Peyrère and the Politics of Historical Certainty in Seventeenth-Century Europe -- Contributors -- Index -- THE UCLA CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY SERIES

Research about users as a source of innovation has been largely restricted to case studies exploring specific innovation projects at the firm level. This study assesses empirically the relationship between external end users' knowledge as an input factor to innovation and firms' innovation success. The results strongly support the hypotheses: (i) that external end users have the potential to essentially improve the innovative performance of firms; (ii) that the technique of interaction during the innovation process and the characteristics of involved external users matter as well. The more firms make use of emphatic design and select specific users to acquire hard-to-articulate customer needs, the stronger is the relationship between access to external end users' knowledge and firm innovation success measured in sales of innovative products.