From the private to the concealed

The second volume of the collection published by Círculo de Leitores has as an inevitable reference the pioneering 1986 French edition. However, since it was written at a different historiographic moment and is about the more strictly delineated context of Portugal in the modern era, the book, organized by Nuno Monteiro under the direction of José Mattoso, avoids using the paradigms of the justice system and a financially expert state, as well as that of the modern family, to explain the emergence of a private sphere in Portugal as opposed to the public one. In the introduction, Monteiro warns about the distinction that is frequently made between the two spheres, and which has only come to be established in contemporary times. Aware of the relative anachronism of the proposal that is made for such a period, the authors do their best to approach subjects that are considered today as belonging to the private sphere, and which were considered differently in the Portugal of the modern era: mainly, the domestic space and the house of a noble family. Therefore, the volume compares the models proposed by Habermas, Elias and Ariès with the results of recent research undertaken in Portuguese historiography. The theologism inherent in the idea of modernization is challenged, as is the use of a Frenchbased chronology in describing the history of Portugal, in which the affirmation of the monarchy was not linear in its development and the spread of reading and writing was strictly limited to the period studied. The authors are thus able to consider the subject by first of all questioning its source. This is in fact a distinct feature of the book: the constant crisscrossing of theory and empiricism that characterizes the historian’s good work. While, in the modern era, the Portuguese did not travel so much to other European kingdoms, they nonetheless traveled throughout Spain in the period when the two crowns were united, and across overseas lands, constructing their own private sphere linked to the colonial world, especially to Portuguese America. The authors also tried not to write a history of everyday life or of material culture, although the dividing line between these aspects and