Color photograph of an Asian woman with auburn hair wearing a purple and gray gridded top; she stands in front of a brick wall and looks at the camera with a slight smile

Nhung Tuyet Tran

Anthony M. Clark Rome Prize
1 settembre 2023–5 luglio 2024
Professione
Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Toronto
Titolo del progetto
Cosmopolitanism, Trans-Imperial Subjects, and the Vietnamese Confession Crisis in the Making of the Early Modern Global Church, 1660–1800
Descrizione del progetto

This study examines how an existential crisis over confession in a North Vietnamese Catholic community prompted local believers to send men of no particular importance across the Indian Ocean and around the African continent to Europe, where they were fêted by Louis XIV in Paris and Innocent XI in Rome. These travelers went on this mission to demand the duties owed them from European religious and secular leaders. My project suggests that the cosmopolitan itineraries of these three catechists triggered the second rites controversy in China, and globally, in 1693. It is a study of how Catholicism as lived and practiced in Vietnam reshaped the global church in the early modern era and how the demands and actions of Vietnamese believers force us to rethink the field of “Global Catholicism.”