................................
THE TEAM
CONTACT
He backed up this approach with direct and immediate contact with the specialist bibliography, only possible through his active knowledge of other languages, as both a reader and a speaker, which put him in a position to translate the works of Gordon Childe, T. S. Ashton, Ernest Baker, Georges Clark, Lucien Febvre, F. L. Ganshof, Pierre Ducassé, Daniel Mornet, Paul Vaucher, and to supervise the translation of other authors. On the brink of official retirement, JBM gave his “final lesson” at the Faculty of Letters on 10 December 1991, on “Portuguese Society in the Time of Camões”.
In contrast to the diversity and richness in his teaching, research and lecturing activities, the number of positions he was offered, and actually accepted, was strikingly modest. He was Secretary of the Portuguese Society for the History of Civilization, an offshoot of the Société Marc Bloch in Paris which was created in Lisbon in 1949, and which had an ephemeral existence. From 1964 he was Secretary of the Centre for Historical Studies of the Institute for High Culture, an annex of the Faculty of Letters in Lisbon, briefly becoming Director (1973-74) after the death of Virgínia Rau. This organization was committed to the development of three areas of research: the history of the structures of Portuguese society, historical demography, and the history of Portuguese international relations. In the Centre’s output we can identify two of the enduring historiographical concerns of JBM, namely the study of the real conditions of the evolution of Portuguese society and the role that international relations have exercised over national history. An intrinsic part of the structuring of the Centre was the creation of the journal Do Tempo e da História. The active involvement of Virgínia Rau and JBM put the Centre in a position to create and sustain a project of historical investigation over a long period of time, and assured it an unfailing prestige, confirmed on many occasions by its national and international congeners, as can be seen from the historical archives in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Lisbon.
