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THE TEAM
CONTACT
This corresponds to a paratextual innovation: in addition to footnotes and endnotes with references, Herculano introduces explanatory notes at the end of each volume. In these notes, he adds details regarding the authenticity, reliability, and interpretation of the mentioned sources, without hindering the overall readability of the text. Herculano’s narrative ranges from events culminating in the independence from León and Castille and the coronation of Afonso I in 1139, to the end of Afonso III’s reign in 1279. His narrative ends there, never to be resumed, contrary to what he had initially intended – proof of this is the title of the work and the periodisation in Cartas sobre a História de Portugal (Mattoso, “Prefácio” [“Preface”], x-xi).
Herculano announced on several occasions that he would resume his work on that book. According to the notes of the Emperor of Brazil, taken shortly after a meeting with Herculano, most of the fifth volume of this work had already been written in mid-1871 (D. Pedro II, Diários [Diaries], XI, 19.06.1871). That volume was never to be completed but the volumes that were published comprehend more than a diachronic narrative of events ending with the death of Afonso III. In two thirds of the third volume and in the entire fourth volume, the dominant perspective of História de Portugal is synchronic, and the narrative focus shifts from specific events to socio-political patterns of a more general and repetitive nature, identifiable mainly in legal documents. It was now, first and foremost, a resolve to never again narrate what had happened in the past from a singular viewpoint but rather to compose, with the direct assistance of historical imagination, what was termed by the author as a “social topography” of 12th and 13th century Portugal (História de Portugal, III, 401). (Insightful parallels might be drawn here with the opening passages of many of his historical fictional writings where imagination is summoned to characterise not just the physical and architectural environments, but also the socio-cultural).
One of the guiding purposes of the second part of Herculano’s book is to offer a history of the middle classes in Portugal, understood broadly as a social cluster situated “between aristocracy and the serfs” (História de Portugal, III, 382). This analytical shift leads to a history where the main characters are collective entities such as institutions and social classes. Therefore, to a great extent, it materialises the methodological innovation advocated in Cartas sobre a História de Portugal – even though the author was not fully able to connect the two main levels of his analysis successfully (Martins, Portugal contemporâneo [Contemporary Portugal], II, 322-323).
