The first encounters of Vietnam with the Western literature in the 17th century (a case study of Jeronimo Maiorica’s Nôm hagiographic writings)

The article discusses the first meetings of Vietnam with the West through the Catholic literature, which partly shows the multi-dimensional nature of the relation of Vietnam with the West in the early 17th century, i.e., in the pre-colonial period of Vietnam. The activities of the first European people arriving to Vietnam in the early 17th century were related with Christian missionaries. Due to the adaptation of Christian literature and the collaboration of the European Jesuits with the Vietnamese writers in creating Catholic Nôm texts, the first steps of Vietnamese Catholic literature were made, leading to the big changes of Vietnamese literature in the succeeding centuries. Jeronimo Maiorica and some of his Nôm hagiographic works as expression of acculturation of Vietnam in the seventeenth century will be examined from a Western-Vietnamese comparative viewpoint.

Vietnamese literature, Jesuit missionaries, Jeronimo Maiorica, hagiographies