His conception of history was already evident in the talk he gave in the University Chapel in 1890 on the subject of the funeral rites of D. João III and it became well established in his “first historical attempt” (1894), later spreading throughout the critical reviews he wrote of historical works (1896). His entry into the Faculty of Letters in 1911, devoting himself exclusively to the teaching of history and to historical research although he remained an active priest, cemented and expanded in the cultural context of the time a method and a theory of history that had prevailed for generations in the Faculty, as mentioned above. He also devoted much time to developing the activity of the Institute of Historical Studies (IEH), an institution for historical research that came into being in 1911 in all the Faculties of Letters, but this was later reduced in Coimbra after 1925 to the activity of the History Group. It was António Vasconcelos who introduced the programme of Seminars that he led and which were held in the Archive. Both here and in the IEH the students under his guidance prepared multiple works that were later published by those who supervised them.

In history, truth is sought but is not always found, no matter how many traces there might be, traces which, for António Vasconcelos, were never only the written ones. It was he who not only instituted “the teaching of Epigraphy and Numismatics, and restored the teaching of Palaeography, Diplomacy and Sphragistics, renewing the brightness of those times when, over a century ago, the great João Pedro Ribeiro taught them here” (Damião Peres, “Prof. Doutor António de Vasconcelos”, 1941, p. 7), but he also did Archaeology (having been the president of the Archaeology section of the Institute), as so many new facts found in his works reveal. These sciences were at that time known as auxiliaries of history, and he used them to bring new life to historical studies as they allowed him to know the facts with detailed accuracy, reminiscent at times of the ceremonialist that he also was.

“The rigorous exposition of the facts, as the supreme law of the historian,” had already been attributed to L. von Ranke (1795-1886). António Vasconcelos knew the methodology of ecclesiastical history well and so, when he decided to work on history after philology, he could not help but be influenced by the German currents of the day (encountering Carolina Michaëlis in Coimbra as a colleague) and by positivism. This was already widely contested when he began his larger publications. At the same time, he evokes Cicero and uses the lesson of Herculano (1810-1877) as to historiographical truth.

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