Seeking Rerum Lusitanorum in the Eternal City

Abstract

Rome in the 1740s was the scene of a major operation of Portuguese memory construction through an initiative of D. João V. The vast project of the gathering of archival and library data in Vatican and Roman holdings undertaken through the efforts of a series of erudite clerical Roman figures and the resident Portuguese ambassador, Manuel Pereira de Sampaio (1691-1750), which would constitute the important collection of documents known as the Rerum Lusitanorum, currently held in the Ajuda library is a telling example of that kind of forging of collective memory under the auspices of an eighteenth-century monarch. The article attempts to reconstruct some of the motivations and people involved in the enterprise and to better understand the spirit which imbued it.

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