Manuel Rodrigues Lapa studied in Lisbon at Casa Pia from the age of 10. Before entering university, he attended Liceu Pedro Nunes and in 1912, he frequently visited the Biblioteca Nacional [National Library] where he read “mysterious manuscripts” from the Closed Reserve Section (he was an under librarian at the Biblioteca between 1920 and 1922). In 1914, as a research fellow of the Luz Soriano legacy, he entered the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa [Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon] – where Adolfo Coelho, Leite de Vasconcelos and José Joaquim Nunes featured amongst his teachers– and in the following year he began his collaboration with the newspaper O Povo de Anadia [The People of Anadia], with an article on Camilo Castelo Branco. In 1919, after enrolling at the Faculdade de Direito [Law School], he completed his licenciatura [first degree] exam in Romance Philology with an overall mark of 13 out of 20; on the recommendation of Leite de Vasconcelos, he taught at the Faculdade de Letras first as a bacharel¹ and later as a contract lecturer.

He taught at the Liceu Camões (Lisbon), Martins Sarmento (Guimarães) and Gil Vicente (Lisbon) in the 1920s. Again, on the recommendation of Leite de Vasconcelos, in 1928 Lapa was hired as a contract assistant professor in the Romance Philology department, where he lectured subjects as diverse as Portuguese Philology, History of Portuguese Literature, History of French Literature, History of Italian Literature, and Compared Grammar of Romance Languages.

In late 1929, he went to Paris on an 8-month scholarship, where he enrolled at the Sorbonne for subjects lectured by great medievalists such as Antoine Thomas and Alfred Jeanroy (Medieval French); Clovis Brunel and Mario Roques (Provençal); Edmond Faral (Medieval Latin Literature).

He completed his doctoral thesis on Romance Philology, Origens da Poesia Lírica em Portugal na Idade Média [Origins of Lyric Poetry in Portugal in the Middle Ages] in Paris (before defending his thesis, he had already begun writing for the journal Seara Nova, which he directed between February 1973 and February 1974 as a substitute for Augusto Abelaira). Lapa faced harsh criticism from Oliveira Guimarães in his viva, on 11th December 1930.

¹A 3-year qualification at university level

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | (Pdf)