Torquato de Sousa Soares was the great driving force behind the RPH until the date of his retirement (1973). Between 1965 and 1970 he worked at a university in Luanda. His return to Coimbra coincided with the RPH's return to mediaeval themes in tomes XII (1969), XIII (1971), and XIV (1974), with a particular focus on the history of institutions, due to the fact that these were tomes in honour of Paulo Merêa, a great scholar in the history of mediaeval institutions. The international projection of this historian can be seen in the wide participation of national historians, especially those specialising in the history of law (Ferrer Correia, Guilherme Braga da Cruz), and above all foreigners, such as Sánchez-Albornoz, Quintana Prieto, Diaz y Diaz, Charles Verlinden, Johannes-Michael Scholz, and Helmut Coing.

Tome XV of the RPH, published in 1975, is a boundary volume between two eras. There were three articles on the Middle Ages and five on the Modern Period, one by António de Oliveira on historical demography and another by Luís Ferrand de Almeida on the problem of the acclimatisation of plants from the Orient in Brazil; Maria Helena da Cruz Coelho reviewed the volume of the Actas de las I Jornadas de Metodologia Aplicada de las Ciencias Historicas [Proceedings of the First Days of Applied Methodology in Historical Sciences] (Mediaeval History), held in Santiago de Compostela. Present were three historians responsible for opening up the RPH, now without ideological constraints, to the various fields of historiographical research.

Focusing on a more general assessment of the existence of RPH in the 40 years between 1976 and 2016, we can say that the journal has remained faithful to the motto inscribed on the ex-libris of António de Vasconcelos: Interroga et diligenter investiga : posing questions and seeking their answers through methodologically rigorous investigations is one of the primary aims of credible history, regardless of the field or the chronological period being analysed. RPH has also remained faithful to the salutary principle of publishing tomes in honour of the members of its editorial staff, on the occasion of their death—Sérgio Soares (XXXV)—or jubilation—Torquato de Sousa Soares (XVI), Salvador Dias Arnaut (XXXI), Luís Ferrand de Almeida, and António de Oliveira (XXXVI).

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