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These were no longer just praises only of monarchs, but praises translated into exempla of the nation's illustrious "men" and "women", although the predominance of members of the High Clergy and Royalty configured a profoundly conservative discourse of moralisation, explicitly modelled on Plutarch's Lives. Yet this was not a unique case in its time. Around the same time, under a similar format (but with far shorter texts and epitomes), the Retratos dos grandes homens da nação portuguesa [Portraits of the great men of the Portuguese nation] were also published by the Spaniard Antonio Patrício Pinto Rodrigues. However, Figueiredo's collection not only featured traditional figures of Royalty, arms, and religion but also others from the realms of sciences and arts and paid unusual, although not unprecedented attention to the female gender, in works of the same type.(H.M. Samyn, “Retratos de donas”, 2013).
The momentum that the biographical genre experienced shortly after the turn of the 19th century stemmed from both the rapid change in criteria for selecting biographical subjects and a reworking of the panegyric register that had always prevailed. This register did not exactly disappear, but rather thrived, to a large extent on a new awareness of public space usage and the potential contained in a particular discourse about the past (not always distant), where the selection of its most worthy representatives would determine its direction. The role in this of the authorised representatives of the legitimacy and memory of the regime and the reigning House, both in the ACL and the university, would not be surprising. There was still a long way to go before the grounds of erudition and dissemination, or propaganda, would be clearly distinguished. During the Peninsular War, Fr. Fortunato de S. Boaventura, future archbishop and professor at the University of Coimbra, published a series of brief portraits dedicated to recording the names and deeds of illustrious individuals for posterity. This was a projective discourse aimed at including present and future actions in history, which were not yet history, making the model of praise the closest reference to a politically committed and intensely practiced way of writing biographies over the many decades to come. Volumes of a few dozen pages, the "biographical news" of Wellington, Beresford, Trant and General Silveira, on the conservative side of the barricade, announced the new impetus the genre would gain well into the century at the hands of academics and curious minds from elsewhere.
