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THE TEAM
CONTACT
Luís de Albuquerque's interest in Nautical History stemmed both from an invitation by António José Saraiva to collaborate in his História da Cultura em Portugal [History of Culture in Portugal] with a chapter on “As navegações e as origens da mentalidade científica” "The Navigations and the Origins of Scientific Mentality"] (in A. J. Saraiva, História da Cultura em Portugal [History of Culture in Portugal], vol. II, 1955, pp. 369-507), and from having taken upon himself the organisation of Luciano Pereira da Silva's (1864-1926) library, acquired by Joaquim Bensaúde and donated to the Mathematics Department of the Universidade de Coimbra, where that illustrious professor also left his mark as a nautical historian. Certainly, Pereira da Silva's beneficial shadow influenced the then young member of the Department, who would also be reminded of the image of another notable professor and author of highly important historiographical work: Duarte Leite (1864-1950).
His path pointed in the direction of History of Nautical Science, but another chapter should also be recalled in which his work was relevant for the time: the History of Education. Once again, his works on Mathematics went hand in hand with critical intervention, studies on the Discoveries in general, and a series of articles on education in Portugal from the Pombaline reforms to the early days of liberalism. These articles would be republished in the author's own edition, and later, with additions, as volume VI of his Estudos de História [Studies on History]. Such texts were important for the relaunch of the discipline of History of Education in Portugal, as testified by Rui Grácio.
Luís de Albuquerque became known essentially as a nautical historian, but prior to the beginning of the series of publications that would establish him as the great expert in the field, the series of twelve articles from Vértice entitled “Introdução à História dos Descobrimentos Portugueses” ["Introduction to the History of the Portuguese Discoveries"] (1957-59) should be recalled, which resulted in the book with the same name published in 1959, and reissued in 1962. This Introdução [Introduction], at the turn of the 1950s to the following decade, was one of the works that would change the History of Portuguese Expansion profoundly, along with titles by Duarte Leite, Vitorino Magalhães Godinho and José Sebastião da Silva Dias.
