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This article aims to outline a panoramic view of the paths taken by researchers, in the last 15 years, in the field of the religious history of the Modern Period in Portugal. Starting from the identification of the scientific production and activities that have achieved a more relevant place in the framework of the study of the religious history in early modern Portugal, since the 1950s, this article draws attention to a set of subjects that urgently need to be debated. It will be argued that research in the area in question continues to constitute a challenge. The focus of this article is the European space of Portugal, not considering productions and research about Portuguese imperial spaces, namely Asia and Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and folklore are repositories of large amounts of information about the natural world. Ideas, perceptions and empirical data held by human communities regarding local species are important sources which enable new scientific discoveries to be made, as well as offering the potential to solve a number of conservation problems. We documented the gecko-related folklore and TEK of the people of southern Portugal, with the particular aim of understanding the main ideas relating to gecko biology and ecology. Our results suggest that local knowledge of gecko ecology and biology is both accurate and relevant. As a result of information provided by local inhabitants, knowledge of the current geographic distribution of Hemidactylus turcicus was expanded, with its presence reported in nine new locations. It was also discovered that locals still have some misconceptions of geckos as poisonous and carriers of dermatological diseases. The presence of these ideas has led the population to a fear of and aversion to geckos, resulting in direct persecution being one of the major conservation problems facing these animals. It is essential, from both a scientific and conservationist perspective, to understand the knowledge and perceptions that people have towards the animals, since, only then, may hitherto unrecognized pertinent information and conservation problems be detected and resolved.

This article focuses on questions concerning the world of dedications that framed Early Modern written culture. It does so in the context of the production and publication of works of different types, ranging from theatre to the literature of spirituality in sixteenth-century Portugal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article intends to draw attention to some letters written by Fr. Estêvão da Purificação (O.C.), Fr. António da Conceição (C.S.J.E) and Father João Cardim (S.J.), especially addressed to ladies, insofar as they allow to see the spiritual ascendant, accomplished, in this concrete case, through spiritual advice and guidance, which these religious exercised with them. Indeed, these letters indicate to us some interesting vectors of the orientation of the spiritual life and the direction of consciousness in Portugal in the seventeenth-century: recommendations for readings, ways of praying or ascetic and devout practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the examples of military «saints» included in the four volumes of Agiologio Lusitano dos Santos, e Varoens ilustres em virtude do Reino de Portugal, e suas conquistas (published between 1652 and 1744), by Jorge Cardoso and D. António Caetano de Sousa, this article seeks to draw attention to the sustainability of the prestige that accompanies this hagiographic model and the various updates that it suffered, in a context marked by the attempt to construct a history of the territorial «sanctity» of portuguese kingdom, enabling it to rival with other European catholic spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to analyze some of the «Lives» of Portuguese religious women of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing on the topics used by biographers when they proceed to the story about the childhood of the protagonists. On the other hand, this article also seeks to show how the appreciation of the moral virtues, spiritual and devotional practices and behavior of children and young people profiled reflects the introduction, in the field of holiness, of coding models that fall within the process of deep redefinition of holiness outlined by the post-Tridentine church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]