Church History http://journals.cambridge.org/CHH Additional services for Church History: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here Mandarins and Martyrs: The Church and the Nguyen Dynasty in Early Nineteenth-Century Vietnam By Jacob Ramsay Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008 xii + 213 pp \ $50.00 cloth Jean Michaud Church History / Volume 78 / Issue 02 / June 2009, pp 425 - 427 DOI: 10.1017/S0009640709000742, Published online: 28 May 2009 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0009640709000742 How to cite this article: Jean Michaud (2009) Church History, 78, pp 425-427 doi:10.1017/ S0009640709000742 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/CHH, IP address: 169.230.243.252 on 25 Mar 2015 425 BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES Orleans) as being as important to understanding American civil religion as are New England and Virginia Collectively, all of the contributors to New Territories, New Perspectives insist on a comprehensive reorientation of grand narratives about American religious history They take issue with the way historians have conceived of the relationship between religion and nationalism in the United States, and their solution is simple enough: recenter the history of religion in America at the actual center of the continent of North America In doing so, Callahan and the other essayists argue that there will be new and insightful avenues for exploring Caribbean, African, and Latin American connections with the continental United States Perhaps unintentionally, however, New Territories, New Perspectives demonstrates just how little conversation there is between American religious historiography and other fields of historical inquiry that have been in the business of decentering and recentering American history for decades It’s a great big world out there—both historically and historiographically—and New Territories, New Perspectives shows how essential crossdisciplinary studies are to larger discussions about religion in North America Michael Pasquier Louisiana State University doi:10.1017/S0009640709000742 Mandarins and Martyrs: The Church and the Nguyen Dynasty in Early Nineteenth-Century Vietnam By Jacob Ramsay Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008 xii ỵ 213 pp $50.00 cloth The early colonial history of French Indochina arguably started with the slow push by French Catholic missionaries sent to the Far East from the mid-seventeenth century onward After Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes famously broke the path in the 1620s, one missionary society, the Socie´te´ des Missions E´trange`res de Paris (MEP), occupied the front line in this long-term penetration This book tells the story of this penetration and the reactions by the Vietnamese rulers as it unfolded in the first half of the nineteenth century Jacob Ramsay presents us here with a well-researched volume making convincing use of Vietnamese and French missionary archives alike to discuss a period that has not yet been thoroughly investigated in relation to the impact of the French missionary push in Vietnam before the military conquest formally started in 1858 Ramsay centers his considerations around the thoughts and actions of the Vietnamese emperors of the Nguyen Dynasty 426 CHURCH HISTORY in reaction to the political impact of that growing Catholic presence within their empire The result is a focused analysis of the three decades preceding the beginning of the French colonization of Indochina and a compelling chronicle and analysis of this uncomfortable encounter In the introduction, the author explains why he chose to focus on the central and southern Vietnam vicariates, in other words on Cochinchina, and gives useful details on his sources Chapter provides the background on the relationship between the Nguyen rulers and the MEP, in particular Emperors Gia Long and Minh Mang Chapter exposes the wariness felt by the imperial court faced with the growing influence of the MEP mission among the Vietnamese population, seeing a direct challenge to Hue’s imperial administration Chapter examines in detail the subsequent anti-Catholic repression of the late 1830s when the court intensified its efforts to wipe out the local Catholic Church Chapters 4, 5, and 6, the more analytical part of the book, bring into the picture the greater interconnectivity of European and Vietnamese societies via the increased presence of European colonial powers in Southeast Asia As I have recently emphasized myself (Jean Michaud, “French Missionary Expansion in Colonial Upper-Tonkin,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 35:2: 287– 310, 2004; Jean Michaud, “Incidental” Ethnographers: French Catholic Missions on the Tonkin-Yunnan Frontier, 1880 – 1930 [Leiden: Brill, 2007]), Ramsay also shows that the MEP pursued a political agenda in harmony with the colonial project and made great strategic use of in-house Catholic publications available in France to gain the metropolitan public opinion for its expansionist cause in Indochina, notably through the spreading of stories detailing the fate of martyrs A five-page epilogue wraps up the manuscript, followed by endnotes and the reference list The undersized index is disappointing for a volume abounding with such a wealth of locations, characters, and events The book is a version of the author’s recently completed Ph.D dissertation in history at the Australian National University, titled “Missionaries, Priests and Mandarins: Catholicism and the Nguyen in Vietnam’s South, 1820 – 1868.” At 172 pages without the endnotes, the author’s demonstration is concise It draws on the archives of the MEP (chiefly on Cochinchina) and the Nguyen Dynastic chronicles Reference to relevant Western publications also abound, showing a good command of French colonial literature, though I believe contemporary documents such as Pierre-Jacques Lemonnier de La Bissache`re (Etat actuel du Tun-Kin, de la Cochinchine et des royaumes de Cambodge, Laos, Lac Tho [Paris: Galignani, vols., 1818]) and analytical ones such as Henri Chappoulie (Rome et les missions d’Indochine au XVIIe sie`cle [Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1943]) could have been included profitably Jacob Ramsay’s carefully crafted book constitutes a most welcome addition to a growing body of scholarly studies of the influence the Socie´te´ des Missions 427 BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES E´trange`res de Paris has had on the history of Vietnam But above all, it also is an excellent portrait of the relationships among the Vietnamese rulers and state, the Vietnamese Catholics, and the Vietnamese population at large at the start of the colonial era Jean Michaud Universite´ Laval doi:10.1017/S0009640709000754 Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France By John Warne Monroe Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008 xii ỵ 297 pp $35.00 cloth Max Weber identified the “disenchantment of the world” as a defining characteristic of modernity, but a profusion of books over the past five years has unveiled another side of the modern Following Alex Owen’s case for The Place of Enchantment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) in modernizing Britain, Corinna Treitel’s location of occultism in an emergent “German modern” in A Science for the Soul (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), and Lynn Sharp’s interpretation of nineteenth-century French spiritism as Secular Spirituality (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2006), John Warne Monroe sees a modern French religious landscape dotted by Laboratories of Faith A “crisis of factuality” (3), he argues, elicited, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a flurry of innovative religious movements that sought—ultimately unsuccessfully—to ground spirituality in empirical science, and which left a lasting mark on French life The book’s particular strength is not in its basic interpretation of modernity—which is not new—but in its cogent narrative and solid grounding of spiritism in its political and social context Through five lengthy chapters, it traces the development and transformation of religious heterodoxy amid the rising authority of scientific empiricism, the emergence of a secular French republic, ideological conflict between secular leftists and the Catholic right, and the advent of experimental psychology Monroe begins in the 1850s as American spiritualism’s tables tournantes, newly arrived in France, became “ciphers” (16) through which several groups addressed their anxieties in the wake of the Revolution of 1848 and the decline of the Second Republic Conservative Catholics sought to transform them from agents of moral decline and political subversion into empirical proof of Catholic dogma; scientists used the bugbear of an unrestrained amour du merveilleux to bolster their claims to technocratic authority and ... North America Michael Pasquier Louisiana State University doi:10.1017/S0009640709000742 Mandarins and Martyrs: The Church and the Nguyen Dynasty in Early Nineteenth-Century Vietnam By Jacob Ramsay... HISTORY in reaction to the political impact of that growing Catholic presence within their empire The result is a focused analysis of the three decades preceding the beginning of the French colonization... dissertation in history at the Australian National University, titled “Missionaries, Priests and Mandarins: Catholicism and the Nguyen in Vietnam’s South, 1820 – 1868.” At 172 pages without the endnotes,