Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos e Joaquim de Vasconcelos

Under preparation (partially available)

BGUC has a large part of the documentary collection that belonged to Professor Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos (1851-1925).

Her personal papers were acquired, together with the Library of Carolina Michaëlis and Joaquim de Vasconcelos, around 1945, by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra. Her personal archive was transferred from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities in February 1975, and is now kept by the General Library. The majority of her library is located at the Faculty, however some monographs remained in the General Library for cataloguing while periodical publications have already been catalogued.

This collection consists of the author's manuscripts (literary and linguistic studies and notes, cultural history, and pedagogy, among others). It includes typographical proofs, printouts and press clippings, with many notes and corrections by the author. It also includes an important set of incoming and outgoing correspondence and letters from third parties (ca. 1200 letters) already processed.

In the 1990s, the epistolary was enriched with the acquisition of a set of letters from Romanists and a handwritten review of the doctoral thesis in German Philology by Ferrand Pimentel de Almeida (1885-1963).

The Epistolary of Joaquim de Vasconcelos is being processed and is available up to the letter N of correspondents.

Correspondence – Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos and Ricardo Jorge

The present Michaelian correspondence constitutes an example of the so-called “scholarly correspondence”. With the creation and development of postal mail, it became especially frequent among scientists from various branches of knowledge in the second half of the 19th century and in the 20th century. In this case, it is an epistolary exchange related to the history of Portuguese literature, which, based on the life and work of the writer Francisco Rodrigues Lobo, opens new perspectives not only on the 17th-century literary period in the Iberian Peninsula, but also on the human, family, cultural and scientific profile of the two correspondents and their respective Portuguese socio-political, cultural and literary context in the first decades of the 20th century. The epistolary collected here between a philologist and an epidemiologist, both national and international celebrities, also stands out for its intercultural character, revealing itself as a precious testimony of the affinities that exist between the Humanities and the so-called Exact Sciences.

In the aftermath of the preparation of the Carolina de Vasconcelos Exhibition, some books that had yet to be treated and belonged to Carolina Michaëlis and Joaquim de Vasconcellos were discovered in the deposits of the General Library. The core was interesting from the point of view of feminism, the history of music and the arts in general, as well as “travels in Portugal”, the couple's collecting theme. In view of this, the Director of the General Library decided to hand over these books to the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, hoping that with this decision to serve the interests of researchers, protect the physical integrity of this collection (already affected by the contingencies of its history) and faciltate the production of the catalog of the Library of Professor Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos.

News of 8 January 2010 [PT].