Thanks largely to the efforts of Frédéric Mauro, Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, and other French-trained historians, a sturdy offshoot of the so-called Annales school has grown up in Portugal. Cândido dos Santos’s recent book embodies the exhaustive research and “totalist” approach associated with that school. Drawing on twenty-one archival collections and a wealth of published material, he examines the religious, cultural, administrative, and economic activity of the Hieronymite order in early modern Portugal.
Though the study ranges from Hieronymite beginnings in Portugal in the late fourteenth century to the early 1700s, most attention is paid to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The author provides illuminating commentary on well-known members of the order, including Fr. Antônio da Beja, a disciple of Pico della Mirandola. The discussion of the order’s financial operations offers a revealing glimpse of the sources of monastic wealth and how it was invested.
Useful as these and other sections of the book are, the study could have been improved by better handling of its abundant sources. There are too many lengthy quotations, and salient points are often listed numerically instead of being fashioned into fluid paragraphs. More coherent organization of material and clearer explanation of why the study concludes at the end of the seventeenth century would have better served the author’s yeoman research effort. Readers who surmount these obstacles will doubtless find this study a worthwhile addition to the scholarly literature on religious orders in Portugal.
