GODS, HEROES, AND ANCESTORS: AN INTERRELIGIOUS ENCOUNTER IN EIGHTEENTH‐CENTURY VIETNAM . By

Starting in the s, several new monographs have explored the relationship between Vietnamese society, culture and religion, and the Catholic Church since the early seventeenth century. These works in Vietnamese, French, and English have advanced our understanding of the nexus between politics and religion, relying on archival repositories in Europe and Vietnam, and critically building on the labors of previous generations of missionary and colonial historians. Some of the best scholarship so far has focused on the first century of Catholic development (–) and on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—including the Nguyễn and colonial periods—but studies about the eighteenth century alone have been scarcer. The two books under review here are thus a timely addition to the growing body of literature on Catholicism in Vietnamese history. They differ in content, style, methodology, and aims, but reading them in tandem was quite illuminating. In fact, they offer a complementary panorama of the religious landscape of northern Vietnam during a period of political and