COMUNICACIÓN

The Board of Trustees and the staff of the European and Ibero-American Academy of Yuste Foundation mourn the passing of the Portuguese historian Manuela Mendonça, a member of the European and Ibero-American Academy of Yuste, who took up the Joan of Arc Chair during the ceremony for the awarding of the Carlos V European Award to the French politician Simone Veil in 2008 at the Monastery of San Jerónimo de Yuste. (27/12/2025)

Manuela Mendonça was born in Montemor-o-Novo in 1948. She held both a degree and a doctorate in Modern and Contemporary History from the University of Lisbon, where she was a lecturer in the Department of History in the Faculty of Arts. She served as deputy director-general of the National Archive of the Torre do Tombo and as secretary-general of the Portuguese Academy of History, of which she had been president since 2006. She was also a member of more than twenty national and foreign academies, including the Historical Society of the Independence of Portugal, the Royal Academy of History of Spain and the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of Spain.

A specialist in the history of the Late Middle Ages and in Iberian and Luso-Brazilian relations, she took part in numerous congresses and authored more than three hundred works published in journals, conference proceedings and books, including O Sonho da União Ibérica (1475 / 1479) and História dos Reis de Portugal.

Manuela Mendonça maintained a very close relationship with Yuste Foundation. She served as a member of the jury for the Carlos V European Award in 2011, 2014, 2018, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2025. For the book Cuadernos de Yuste No. 3, published in 2005, she wrote the article “Península ibérica: Europa ou ultramar?”

She also signed the Yuste Academy Declaration, “What all European pupils should know about Europe: Towards an interactive curriculum of European civilisation secondary school students”, together with other academicians such as Paul Preston, Martti Ahtisaari and Tzvetan Todorov, who met at the Monastery of San Jerónimo de Yuste in 2008.

In 2020, the Newsletter of the Academy of Yuste published an interview with the Portuguese historian in which she stressed the need for Europe to engage in deep reflection in order to “continue along the path of values based on peace, freedom and solidarity”.

Manuela Mendonça took part in and co-directed several of Yuste Foundation’s summer courses under the Campus Yuste programme, including the one held last summer entitled “Portugal, 1974: Society, Culture and Literature in the Carnation Revolution”, and “The Hispanic Kingdoms between Ferdinand the Catholic and Charles V: European and American Political and Cultural Projection”, in 2016. She also delivered the lecture “An Introduction to the History of Portugal up to 1910” at the Spanish-Portuguese seminar entitled “Introduction to the History and Public Law of Portugal”, held at the Faculty of Law in Cáceres.