Sir Peter E. Russell – the 20th Century in the Palm of His Hand

In 1992, I was at the National Archives in Lisbon preparing my doctoral thesis on late medieval Portuguese military history, feeling more and more curious about the idea of clearing up a longstanding doubt: was Peter Russell, the author of the study As fontes de Fernão Lopes, published in Coimbra in 1941, still alive and was he still active academically? This was a book that I had used a great deal years before, in preparing myself for the examination I had to take in 1987 to prove my academic and teaching capabilities, at the Faculty of Letters at the University of Coimbra. The question made sense, not only because of the quality and profoundly innovative spirit of that study, but also because of the fairly prosaic fact that more than 50 years had elapsed since its publication.