Observation in situ also led him to indicate “the exact place” where Pier Maria Baldi placed his work table to draw the well-known panorama of Coimbra (A Sé Velha, vol. II, 1935, p. 172). Historiography in Coimbra did not lose the illusion of seeking the accuracy and certification of facts again until the 1974 Carnation Revolution and the post-modernist revolution.

Precision and impartiality were aspects of António Vasconcelos’ scientific methodology and characteristic features of his nature, marked by a vigorous and persistent critical spirit. His criticisms did not spare ecclesiastical institutions, whether the Inquisition or the Canons of the Order of the Holy Cross (the Crosiers) or the Sé Cathedral, for example, when he found they were unjustly blocking his path to history, whether past or present.

When history became a science, it eliminated from its narrative “all literary ornamentation and unproven facts”, as Frederick Teggart explained in 1918. António Vasconcelos had proceeded like this back in 1894 but his style, “of an incommodious dryness”, was criticized from the start by Mendes dos Remédios who considered that the object of study itself imposed “the harmony of historical accuracy and the artistic-verbal form” («D. Isabel de Aragão», O Instituto, 41, 1894, p. 916-917). This criticism by the young theologian did not make António Vasconcelos deviate from his ideas, and he continued to consider rhetorical history as being incapable of becoming scientific. As a precaution, however, when he published the opuscule entitled Real capela da Universidade (Royal University Chapel) (1908), he warned at the start that “it was not written with any literary pretensions”. Later critics considered António Vasconcelos to be “a consummate master of the language” (M. T. Salgueiro, «Discurso», 1936, p. 20) and in 1996 the president of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, when re-editing Brás Garcia Mascarenhas, said he had been right and praised him “for the clarity of the writing and even for the simplicity of style, so appropriate to historical studies” (p. VII)). He did in fact have a profound knowledge of the Portuguese language, which is where he had started before becoming a historian.

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