About the digital collection
The collection of Portuguese medieval sources by A. H. de Oliveira Marques made available online by the Institute of Medieval Studies, comes under the protocol signed by this Research Unit and the Center for Historical Studies, on March 10, 2021.
This work is funded by national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia under the project Program Financing) UIDB/00749/2020.
Biographical Note
A. H. de Oliveira Marques (1933-2007)
Historian and full professor, named António Henrique Rodrigo de Oliveira Marques.
He attended Camões and Gil Vicente high schools, in Lisbon. In 1956, he graduated in Historical-Philosophical Sciences at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, with a dissertation entitled “Sociedade em Portugal nos séculos XII a XIV”.
After his internship at the University of Wüfrzburg (Germany), he began teaching in 1957 at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, where he received his doctorate in History in 1960 (June), with the dissertation “Hansa e Portugal na Idade Média”.
In 1962 he took part in the academic strike, on the side of the students, which led to his dismissal from the Portuguese University.
In 1965, he left for the United States of America, teaching as an associate and full professor at the universities of Auburn, Florida, Columbia, Minnesota, and Chicago, and touring much of that country as a lecture. In 1970 he returned definitively to Portugal, although it was only after the 25th of April 1974 that the doors of the Portuguese University were opened to him again.
From October 1974 to April 1976, he was Director of the National Library of Portugal (at the time called BNL).
In 1976 (July) he took up his post as full professor at the NOVA University, being appointed President of the Installing Committee (1977 to 1980) of the newly created School of Social Sciences and Humanities, and later elected President of the Scientific Council, from 1981 to 1983 and from 1984 to 1986.
He was President of the Propaedeutic Year for the 1977-1978 academic year.
When he joined the Freemasonry, still during the clandestine period (1973), he played an important role in that institution, being elected its Deputy Grand Master (1984-86) and its Sovereign Grand Commander of the Supreme Council of Degree 33 (1991-94).
In 1997 he received an honorary Doctorate from La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.
In 1998 he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Liberty by the President of the Republic.
The total number of his publications exceeds sixty volumes. His collaboration, with articles, in journals, dictionaries, and encyclopedias exceeds a thousand. He has given numerous lectures at universities in Europe, the United States, Brazil, and Argentina.
His most famous book is the História de Portugal, initially in two volumes and later re-edited into three (1981), which has already reached fifteen editions in the Portuguese language and has been translated into Spanish, French, English, Japanese, and Polish; two (more or less) shortened versions have also been published in German, Chinese, French, English, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian (some of these versions have been published in more than a dozen editions).
We owe to him the introduction or the diffusion in Portugal of historical themes, some of them in full development today: history of daily life, medieval urban history, history of techniques, history of climate, history of animals, history of the 1st Portuguese Republic, history of the Portuguese Freemasonry, etc. We also owe him the adaptation to the Portuguese case of concepts widely used abroad, but not very common in Portugal at the time, such as Feudalism and Fascism. Almost all of his work is full of new ideas, to internationalize and above all Europeanize structures and conjunctures previously limited to the Portuguese case.
He was one of the founders of the Centro de Estudos Históricos – UNL (C.E.H.) and its director from 1980 to 1992. The C.E.H., aware of the lack of historical sources – easy to use -, developed, under his direction (a policy that continued thereafter), systematic work in terms of their reading, fixing, and dissemination, contributing to the development of historiography, as well as to accelerate the respective research. Among these publications of sources, he started with the “Chancellarias Portuguesas” (Portuguese Chancelleries), and the “Cortes Portuguesas” (Portuguese Courts), trying to fill a gap, long felt by researchers, especially when comparing the Portuguese reality with the rest of Europe. (The C.E.H. did not apply, in recent years, for external funds, so it is not integrated into the current Research Centers supported).