It was also as Duarte de Montalegre that he published, in 1954, during the international campaign for the release of Ezra Pound, the text of the broadcast by the Vatican station and Radio Italiana on 30 March 1945 ( Promethée enchainé. Émission de la Radio du Vatican sur le cas de Ezra Pound – Prometheus Bound . Vatican radio Broadcast on the Case of Ezra Pound, Rome, 1945). The last work he signed under a pseudonym was Ensaios de Literatura Europeia (Essays on European Literature), published in 1963, in the same year that, as a result of collaboration with the antiquarian bookshop ‘O Mundo do Livro’, he published in Lisbon, under his own name, an anastatic edition of Apologia propositarum suarum: text from the 1532 edition by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, with an introductory study.

This date, which coincides with the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of that author, marks a turning point in the intellectual career of José V. de Pina Martins, who seems to have definitively opted, from then on, for themes related to the history of books and the history of humanist and Renaissance mentalities. The patient gathering of volumes intended to feed the Library of Rare Works on Renaissance Themes, begun in 1951 – which the bibliophile called the “Library of Humanistic Studies” – was accompanied by increasingly focused research, both in what we would now call “material bibliography” and in the historical exploration of documentary sources relevant to the history of the circulation of ideas, texts and images in early modern Europe. A considerable part of his studies focus on key figures – such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, Pietro Bembo, Aldo Manuzio, Garcilaso de la Vega, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Thomas More, Sá de Miranda, Bernardim Ribeiro, Damião de Góis, Camões, Jerónimo Osório – which have enabled him to focus, through case studies, on working hypotheses and broad theoretical and methodological questions.

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