If one considers the Kantian cosmopolitan to be the result of political and cultural forces specific to Western European societies, then it is no more than a situated form of local knowledge. There were other forms of local globalism that were as situated as the Kantian cosmopolitan. The difference is that the forms of Catholic local globalism that I discuss here never became normative and universal. Moreover, the forms of local globalism explored in this essay never acquired the geopolitical epistemological authority to cast Kant as a parochial Prussian whose ideas were no more than one version of local globalism. In an unexpected turn, the Enlightenment notion of the cosmopolitan acquires the epistemological authority to cast the Black, nuns, and Indigenous intellectuals explored in this piece as parochial and local. This essay offers an alternative to early-modern forms of the local “cosmopolitan,” namely, individuals who often did travel physically more than Kant, with the exception of a few nuns who, like our Prussian, imagined the globe as a whole by firmly staying in one place.

This chapter directly addresses a popular literary-historical comparison between two well-known scenes, the encounter of Gilgameš and Ištar in the Epic of Gilgameš VI, and the encounter of Diomedes and Aphrodite in Iliad 5, but draws attention to possible links between the Gilgameš episode and the Mesopotamian lexical tradition. These links suggest that the episode may have emerged from a specifically Mesopotamian scholarly or didactic background, which, the author argues, makes scenarios of oral transmission of Gilgameš to the Greek world seem questionable. As in the case of Enūma eliš, the immediate Mesopotamian context of Gilgameš will have to be taken into account in any comparative effort to situate the literary texts in an even broader context.