Miguel de Asúa's recent book is a much‐welcome contribution to the history of science in Argentina, and to the surprisingly meager historical studies on science and religion in Latin America at large. The historiography of science and religion has undergone serious changes ever since John H. Brooke's seminal 1991 Science and Religion. Historical Perspectives. The so‐called “complexity thesis” was a successful attempt to de‐essentialize the historical study of the relationships between science and religion and to make them historically contingent. More than two decades later, Peter Harrison's 2015 The Territories of Science and Religion managed to move a step beyond and to challenge the very notions of “science” and of “religion” as a necessary prolegomenon before talking about their historical relationships. If neither were essential, a‐historical categories, their interrelations could hardly have a clear narrative. Yet, both Brooke and Harrison's works were implicitly rooted in the Anglo‐Protestant tradition of natural theology and natural philosophy. There was (and still is) the pending task to see if those historiographical projects can, in principle, be extended to other cultural, religious, and geographical milieus.

The first attempts to de‐colonize the field, with volumes such as Brooke and Ronald L. Numbers’ 2011 Science and Religion around the World, welcome as they are, have at times been accused of indirectly colonizing it by spreading around the world the categories developed by earlier science‐and‐religion historians. Be that as it may, there is often an unwanted side effect when spreading the historiographical categories developed in the Anglo‐Protestant world to distant worlds (both culturally and geographical) and to other religions; namely, the assumption that one can think of the Christian worlds as relatively uniform. That was the gap that projects such as SOW (on science and religion in the Orthodox world) or Miguel de Asúa's book try to fill.

Science and Catholicism in Argentina is the result of decades of scholarly work by Miguel de Asúa on the history of science and of medicine in that country. In it we learn about the creation and development of scientific institutions and a culture of and about science in a nation, Argentina, that was, in many respects, brand new in the nineteenth century. Different from other Spanish territories in Latin America, Argentina had, by the time of independence, a very meagre sense of identity, rather weak institutions and very low population numbers. Thus, it became a unique experiment by which the local elites appropriated the new ideas, mostly coming from French positivism, in their attempt to create a modern nation. And this is, in my reading, the most important contribution this book offers to the historiography of science and religion: by importing positivistic narratives about science and religion into a still‐nonexisting scientific culture, Argentina was jumping the gun and incorporating narratives about science‐and‐religion conflicts even before these could arise.

The introduction of this book is a masterpiece on some of the tools needed to produce serious work on the history of science and religion in Latin America and, I would argue, also in many European countries influenced by post‐Enlightenment French ideologies, especially positivism and, later, laicism and scientism. Without a close attention to the different, even opposing, political and juridical systems between English common law and the Continental Napoleonic code tradition, histories about the relationship between science and religion are bound to fail. Equally important are the differences in the internal theological and institutional modes of change within the Reformed Christian churches and traditions and the Catholic Church, though the latter also demands attention to the tensions between regular and secular clergy and between ultramontane and Gallican leanings. De Asúa characterizes these differences using David Martin's 1978 A General Theory of Secularization (and his revised 2005 On Secularization: Towards a Revised Theory) and arguing that “it was not the theoretical content of scientific theories but scientistic worldviews or ideologies which played a part, if any, in the secularisation of the West” (p. 16).

The book follows a standard chronological division, each chapter delving with a particular time period of the history of Argentina, from a first chapter on “Jesuit science” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to seven more chapters on the increasing creation of naturalistic, scientific, and educational institutions in independent Argentina until the mid‐twentieth century. The wealth of material and research in most of the sections is praiseworthy, and the book provides the reader with a vast array of information about politics in Argentina, about many of its most noticeable naturalists and scientists, and about the challenges in the creation of new scientific and educational institutions.

A good example of the first scientistic movements was the transformation, in 1822, of the Buenos Aires convent of Santo Domingo into a “science center” that housed laboratories of physics and chemistry, a museum of natural history and an astronomical observatory (chapter 3). Interestingly, the building was there but both instruments and personnel had to come from abroad and, even then, it was hardly clear what their task was other than showing that Argentina was going to be built under the guidance of modern science. Another well‐known example is the convoluted controversy around the figure of Florentino Ameghino, who defended that humanity in America had started in the area of La Plata and had extended from there to the rest of the Continent. The episode had all the ingredients for a good science‐and‐religion story since it includes disputes about evolution, national identity, and the creation of a secular saint (chapter 5).

A challenge De Asúa meets with uneven results, however, is that of discriminating between “secular” and “religious” (or “Catholic”, in this case) science. In the first chapter, for instance, he distinguishes the motives behind the study of the local flora and fauna by the members of religious orders and by the officials of the Spanish Crown. The former would be, in the author's reading, interested in Nature mainly as a means for their apostolate, while the latter would be motivated by the wealth obtainable from natural resources. This dichotomy, as if they were two sets of different, even contradictory, groups of people, looks problematic to me. Later on, the diversity of Catholic actors (from Church officials to local clergy, from religious orders to lay people and lapse Catholics) begs the question as to why some people would be placed on the side of Catholicism and others would not. It seems that, inevitably, a book on the history of science and religion cannot avoid the trap of having to decide who speaks for science and who represents religion.

Having said that, this book is a must for anyone interested in the history of science and religion and one that should help trigger more studies both in/about Argentina and in/about Latin America.