Abstract
Virtually absent from official historiography, the memory of women is preserved in individual biographies, religious practices and folklore. The lecture analyzes the crumbs of history (up to the 10th century) gathered from these different sources, and shows how they are taken up, reconstructed and recreated in different later contexts. In particular, I will evoke the religion of the Mothers(đạo Mẫu), a cult of mother-goddesses from the earliest times which, integrating exogenous elements such as Taoism or Shamanism and endogenous elements from Vietnamese history and from different ethnic cultures in Việt Nam has constituted an original symbiosis still in the process of reinvention today. At the same time, I will report on recent research and reflections in Việt Nam on the legacy of the millennial past as well as on preserved or reinvented practices of the fertility cult(tín ngưỡng phồn thực). I will analyze its meanings and ambivalent impacts on male-female relations.
