The introduction is “ a model of how Cintra practised the philological method in a natural state, without reference to theories or the support of analysis techniques, apart from careful observation of the facts, whose connections were discovered through intuition and common sense ” [Castro 1993: 154-155]. The idea, thus put forward, that Cintra practised the philological method in a natural state allows us to understand the claim, made by Cintra himself, that he did not theorise. Indeed, his disconcerting statement , “ I simply worked on materials and let myself be led by them as far as they would take me ” ( org. Faria 1999: 27 ), may give the wrong image of him as a researcher and a misleading impression of philology as a mode of reflection. To get the image and impression right, it is worth remembering the three questions posed by Wolfgang Mommsen that Lindley Cintra ’ s work answer ed affirmatively : “( a) Were the relevant sources used and was the state of the art taken into account? , ( b) How close did these historical judgements come to an optimal integration of all possible historical data? , ( c) Are the explicit or underlying models of explanation rigorous, coherent and non-contradictory? ” [ apud Le Goff 1984: 167].

In order to verify the affirmative answer to these questions in Cintra ’ s major work, there is an initial concern with the delimitation of the corpus under study, but also a relational broadening. In fact, the accurate transcription of the codex of the Academia das Ciências [Academy of Sciences] went hand in hand with a broad selection of the corpus, given the perception of the Iberian nature of the family of texts he was dealing with. Even before his stay in Madrid, where he carried out research for his doctorate with a grant from the Instituto de Alta Cultura [Institute of High Culture] , it is to be assumed that the principles of comparative grammar of the Romance languages, taught by Harri Meier, inculcated in him the gesture of comparison as a key element in the approach to any textual corpus. In the specific case of the Crónica Geral [General Chronicle] , the comparison between Castilian and Portuguese manuscripts was followed by the survey and annotation of significant variants.

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