The Temptation of the Synthesis

In the mid-1980s, the first volume of the New History of Portugal, edited by A. H. de Oliveira Marques and Joel Serrão, was published. This was a work that examined the period of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and consisted of the fourth volume of a long and comprehensive edition of a New History of Portugal. The sole person responsible for this volume was Oliveira Marques, the author who, at the beginning of the 1970s, had been behind the publication of a new and innovative History of Portugal in only two volumes, but who proposed a synthetic revision of the History of Portugal through the eyes of a single author.