摘要：Discussing what has or has not been said in the historiography written in English about themes from Portuguese history runs the risk of being transformed into a string of constantly repeated lamentations. As a general rule, there is almost always a tendency to fall back on a comment made by Laura de Mello e Souza in the first published review (1995) of Maxwell's book about Pombal: "peripheral, both in the past and in the present, Portugal has ended up being miniaturized by European historians, who have placed it well below its real dimensions or have simply ignored it."2Nonetheless, the eighteenth century has a number of quite distinctive marks, which are best not forgotten
