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2. "Great ordinary men". In the 19th century, biography experienced its first real moment of expansion in terms of the number of practitioners and the exponential increase in demand. This phenomenon, or "age of hypermnesia," to use the words of Castelo Branco Chaves, was obviously not unrelated to the relative democratisation of access to books or the pronounced change in the profile of the portrait-worthy figure, especially in terms of opening the genre to contemporaneity and political confrontation. The climate was ironically conducive to perpetuation of the panegyric tone that had so well suited the biographical genre and the more traditionalist conceptions of historical writing, albeit with new players. While the predominance of the more or less mitigated chronicle record, and the preferential choice of exemplary figures from the realms of arms and governance became less clear in the liberal period, they did not disappear. Not only did they continue to mark the work of conservative authors, but also on the flip side, those who saw the publicising of national accomplishments and unique backgrounds as a privileged avenue for advocating the new regime and new social order, embodied by its major (but also minor, at times) exponents. In more than one sense, as will be seen, the great man of the democratising visions of Liberalism mainly consisted of a redefinition of the traditional hero from the past. (C.B. Chaves, Memorialistas portugueses, 1978, p.15; F. Catroga, A historiografia de Oliveira Martins, 1999, pp.448-449)
Despite the distinctly nationalistic if not propagandistic civic and political commitment characterising this new phase of biographical writing, its evident vigour was not alien to the more restricted and specialised circles of historiographical activity. In the new Curso Superior de Letras or later, in the faculties of arts, as well as in the ACL, the University of Coimbra, and the Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa [Lisbon Geographical Society] (SGL), historical biography was both a scholarly product – and, following some loose strands of Positivism, a means of reflecting on determination and indetermination in history – and a privileged vehicle for historians' intervention in the society of their time. Indeed, the erudite tradition inherited from the previous century was not lost amid the political and social instability of those years; rather, it was solidified and ensured a long life as the ultimate instance of the autonomy and specificity of historiographical work. Here some of the most fervent biographers of the time may be found, authors of short-range news pieces often published in periodicals but also of texts with a broader scope.
