Vietnamese Catholic Manuscripts and Early Printed Works
Vietnamese Catholic Manuscripts and Early Printed Works
The Vietnamese Catholic Manuscripts and Early Printed Works Collection, curated from the Borgia Tonchinensis Collection held by the Vatican Library and made accessible through the Vatican Digital Library, brings together forty-one manuscripts and early printed works documenting the development of Vietnamese Catholicism and Catholic literary culture from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Preserved in the Vatican Library, these materials include historical chronicles, saints’ lives, catechisms, prayer books, devotional and liturgical texts, biblical narratives, dictionaries, correspondence, poetry, missionary records, and personal memoirs. A substantial portion of the collection is associated with the Vietnamese priest Philiphê do Rosario Nguyễn Văn Bỉnh and the Catholic delegation that left Tonkin for Lisbon in 1796. Written, copied, translated, or collected during Nguyễn Văn Bỉnh’s years in Portugal, these works illuminate the history of the Jesuit mission in Vietnam, the Garasa schism, the delegation’s efforts to obtain a bishop for the Vietnamese Jesuit community, and the intellectual and spiritual life of Vietnamese Catholics living between Vietnam and Europe. The collection is linguistically and materially diverse. Its texts appear in early chữ Quốc ngữ, chữ Nôm, Latin, Portuguese, French, and literary Chinese, sometimes within the same volume. They range from Nguyễn Văn Bỉnh’s histories of Catholicism in Đàng Ngoài and Đàng Trong and his biographies of Jesuit saints to copies of Alexandre de Rhodes’s Vietnamese–Portuguese–Latin dictionary, Jeronimo Maiorica’s devotional writings, Catholic poetry in chữ Nôm, ecclesiastical correspondence, and Vietnamese translations of European religious and historical works. Together, these materials offer an exceptional record of the encounters among Vietnamese language, literature, religion, and global Catholic networks. They are valuable not only for studying the history of Christianity in Vietnam but also for research on early chữ Quốc ngữ, Catholic chữ Nôm literature, translation, manuscript circulation, Vietnamese–European relations, and the emergence of new forms of Vietnamese historical and autobiographical writing. Digitizing Việt Nam would like to express its sincere gratitude to the Vatican Digital Library (https://digi.vatlib.it/) for granting permission to mirror these manuscripts on the Digitizing Việt Nam platform. (Coming soon)