The working method which, in the land of Carolina’s birth, was learnt from the cradle and strengthened at school seemed to be entirely lacking in her adoptive country. She left us a comparative picture of this difference in the articles she published about the methodology for teaching children to read, Cartilha Maternal (A Cartilha Portuguesa… 1976), which are an example of her comparative procedures. In any and every study signed by Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos, on any and every type of documentary carrier, we always find that she cross-referenced the vertical and horizontal dimensions – for example, by clarifying the circumstances that existed before the document was produced and comparing it to coeval documentation, highlighting the relevance of its distinguishing characteristics both case-by-case and as a whole. Taken together, these procedures form a methodology that can be said to fall within the great positivist school headed by Leopold Von Ranke.

Another feature of her work was her practice of publishing parts of ongoing projects, on the basis that making them available to the scientific community meant that they could immediately be critiqued. Periodical journals and correspondence formed an integral part of this system, which in the late 19th and early 20th centuries allowed the free circulation of ideas and books. Carolina herself constantly engaged in the exercise of critiquing other people’s works. Thus it is that we find, during her lifetime, the publication and republication of works, very often in order to go deeper into partial conclusions she had previously published. A good example of this constant reflection process can be found in her own criticisms of her earlier work, which are presented in the set of “Estudos sobre o romanceiro peninsular” (Studies on the peninsular novels), which was published between 1907 and 1909 in Cultura Española (Romances Velhos em Portugal, 1934).

In 1876, her Protestant credo, which was substantially dominated by rationalism, led her to say: “What we do is just to demonstrate that science, which we name judge of all … ideas, cannot and must not construct … without an absolutely sound base; it cannot and must not take account of intentions, even the most philanthropic ones, when they compromise its principles” (A Cartilha Portuguesa…, 1976, p.80). She did not leave any testimonies of her faith, except that it was pared down to a “natural religiousness”, which she expressed when she wrote Uriel da Costa (1922).

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