Olga Dror's Cult, culture, and authority: Princess Liễu Hạnh in Vietnamese history is an examination of narratives from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries about the life of a Vietnamese female deity, Liễu Hạnh, the focus of a cult which has been popular in northern Vietnam for centuries. Dror argues in her introduction that Liễu Hạnh's cult has endured because its ritual ‘form’ has enabled followers to successfully fulfil their main objective, which has been to seek a divine response for their supplications from her sublime power. In contrast to this stable ritual form, Dror focuses on stories about Liễu Hạnh's life, or what she calls the narrative ‘content’ of the cult, which various intellectuals created over the centuries. While the ritual form of the cult remained stable, its narrative content changed over time to fit the needs of intellectuals in different periods. Examining these texts is Dror's main purpose in this work; however, along the way readers are informed about many other aspects of Liễu Hạnh's cult in particular, and religious life in premodern and modern Vietnam in general.

The book begins and ends with chapters which examine broader issues pertaining to spirits and religious cults in Vietnamese history. The first chapter examines the history of Vietnamese writings on spirits over a period of some 800 years, from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries. The final chapter, meanwhile, compares how popular religion, and Liễu Hạnh's cult in particular, has fared over the past century or so under imperial, colonial and Communist rule. In between these two chapters, Dror turns to her main topic, Liễu Hạnh's cult and the narratives about her life. In the second chapter Dror sifts through the scattered and at times contradictory literary debris about the origins of Liễu Hạnh's cult in an effort to determine its historicity. The following two chapters then examine writings by intellectuals about Liễu Hạnh's life. Dror begins with a famous account by the eighteenth-century female writer, Đoàn Thị Điểm, and then moves on to consider the works of such writers as Nguyễn Công Trứ and Kiều Oánh Mậu, from the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, respectively.

Cult, culture, and authority is a significant piece of scholarship. Dror has painstakingly accumulated many scattered and obscure sources on the life of Liễu Hạnh and has endeavoured to make sense of these writings. This alone is impressive. Additionally, however, Dror has also given serious thought to how religions have been historically practised in Vietnam and has sought to conceptualise how governments have dealt with religious cults from the late imperial period to the present. As a result, this work will be of interest to a wide range of scholars, from those interested in literature, to religion, to history.

While this work thus possesses numerous strengths, readers will probably also find points and approaches which they disagree with in this work. For instance, Dror mentions but largely ignores in her interpretations the role that genre plays in many of the works she examines. Hence, rather than examining Đoàn Thị Điểm's biography of Liễu Hạnh as a piece of chuanqi literature, and considering the many ways in which gender distinctions were manipulated in that genre, Dror sees that piece as a call for women's emancipation. Indeed throughout her discussion of the narratives of Liễu Hạnh's life, Dror makes reference to the ideas of Western philosophers such as Schiller and Wittgenstein and sees existentialist ideas in Nguyễn Công Trứ's nineteenth-century writing on Liễu Hạnh. While Dror acknowledges that viewing these texts through such a Western lens has limitations, she nonetheless feels that this view of the Vietnamese past can provide valid insights. This may be true, but it is equally valid to endeavour to examine texts through the prism of the cultural and literary traditions in which they were produced.

Finally, Dror mentions but ultimately dismisses a large body of moralising spirit writings which were produced by followers of Liễu Hạnh's cult in the early twentieth century as imitations of works attributed to other deities which ‘exposed a typical effort of that time to strengthen a vision of Vietnamese statehood with Confucian morality’ (p. 195). While Dror's characterisation of the motive of these texts is accurate, there are more than the nine examples of such texts which Dror cites, and they are far from uniform in their style and content. These texts constitute an important context of this cult, and they may very well have also affected the cult's form by bringing in the worship of male deities such as Trần Hưng Đạo.

In conclusion, this work is a significant contribution to our understanding of popular religion in premodern and modern Vietnam. There is more that can and should be said, but scholars should be grateful to Olga Dror for leading the way.