The remarkable book organized by Pedro Luiz Moreno Martínez is not only an homage, but also a fruitful balance on recent History of Education, from the perspective of Spanish researchers. With his customary competence and dedication, the author-organizer goes over Spanish historiographic production through the legacy of Antonio Viñao. A fair homage emerged from Viñao’s retirement of his role in the Departamento de Teoria e Historia de la Educación at Universidad de Murcia, in Southeast Spain.

The work offers readers interested in historiographic studies an array of themes developed by different historians, in a rigorous and creative dialogue with the honored body of work. Starting with the gaze of Dollores Garrillo Gallego and Damián Lópes Martínez, professors of Universidad de Murcia, on Viñao’s trajectory who, graduated in Law became a reference in the studies of History of Education not only in Spain. After, María José Martinez Ruiz-Funes and Ana Sebastián Vicente, professors at the same university, analyze the place occupied by Universidad de Murcia in the reconfiguration and renovation of the field since the 1980s. This renovation, from which many of the authors in the book took part, would delineate the independence of History of Education studies to the pedagogical field. Certainly, this contributed to the emergence in this University of one of the strongest branches of history studies on educational phenomena, known worldwide by the power of their empirical, theoretical, and methodological assumptions.

In this sense, grounded on the Murcian experience, the book works as a map of Spanish historiographic production in the last three decades, while also helping enquire the constant development of the field. Part of this trajectory is presented by Antón Costa Rico, researcher of Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, when dealing with historians’ moral responsibility following traces of the biography and the context(s) which allowed the renovation of Spanish historiographic, dialoguing with other national traditions, a process in which Antonio Viñao had a strong participation. The author reminds a postulate of Viñao, to whom “the historian enacts an activity of creative and interpretative reorganization”, implying critically thinking his/her own assumptions, as well as the intended aims. In this attempt to break away from the disciplinary codes of the History of Pedagogy tradition, new sources emerged from new gazes that articulate methodological and analytical rigor, also granting a political status to historians’ work, contributing to demystify the past.

Brazilian historians of education have always found in Antonio Viñao’s work a stimulating incentive on the studies in literacy and written culture, explored by Narciso de Gabriel, of Universidade da Coruña, and on the history of school subjects and school manuals, approached by Gabriela Ossembach Sauter, researcher on the Centro de Investigación MANES and at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia. In the first case, Gabriel shows how a significant part of the author’s work was dedicated to this study field, always regarding orality, when it was still incipient. On the studies of curriculum, Gabriela Ossembach recognizes that the most important contribution of Viñao to the field has maybe been on the history of school subject, about which he has also published a text in Brazil, a reference on this debate. The same can be said on the history of educational spaces and time, in the book approached by Agustín Escolano Benito, Viñao’s partner in many initiatives, who believes Viñao was a pioneer on defining a research agenda on the theme, even globally. Such emphasis has probably arisen from his experience in the political-administrative domain, before his academic career, as he had worked on the planning and management of school constructions and their relations with the urbanization in different Spanish regions. It is worth noting that the debate on the concept of school culture, arrived to us in the 1990s from the French tradition in the proposals of Andre Chervel and Dominique Juliá, but was greatly developed by Viñao’s sharp analysis. Moreover, the author continues to refine this concept in recent publications, problematizing its power. In the volume analyzed, Alejandro Tiana Ferrer, also a professor at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia discusses this topic in articulation with the history of educational systems and its educational reforms and innovations.

On historiographic power, the book organized by Pedro Luiz Moreno Martinez continues to offer real empirical and analytical findings. This is the case of the chapter written by Maria del Mar de Pozo Andrés, of Universidad de Alcalá, about the historiography of graded education in an international perspective, or the gaps between rhetoric and reality when questioning educational politics, in the perspective of Juan Manuel Fernández-Soria, of Universidad de Valencia. In the case of Pozo Andrés, the author shows how the concerns on the history of graded education were established in the 1980s, as it became one of the main landmarks of Spanish pedagogical regenerationism, a cause held by many reformers and a sign of a Spain that wanted to modernize itself. The emphasis given by the first book of Antonio Viñao on the theme would have, according to the author, defined a turn on how to understand the history of schooling processes beyond Spanish borders. Vinão published in Brazil, by SBHE, a questioning on the failures of educational policies. About this topic, Fernandez-Soria approaches a broad array of questions pertinent to Spanish historiography: the right to education and freedom of education, the dismantlement of education as a public good, the downgrade of the notion of “public”, the loss of value of demography, among others. Very current themes to the reality of Brazilian researchers.

Manuel de Puelles Benítez, emeritus professor of UNED, offers a beautiful parallel between his trajectory and that of Viñao, focusing on the studies about the ideological precedents of modern education and their effects to the creation and consolidation of what would become Secondary Education, which owns much to the renovating winds that found primary education in the 16th century. This is a stream only recently pursued by Brazilian historians of education and much can be learned through, what the author calls, “the Spanish case”. Other powerful contributions are the chapters on school statistic and the schooling process between the 18th and 20th centuries, written by Jean-Louis Guereña, researcher at Université Fraçois-Rabelais, Tours, who questions the “truth of numbers” and problematizes the “statistical knowledge as an instrument of efficient educational policies”, showing that the concern of Spanish historians on the theme dates the 1980s. Thus, the author untangles the dialogues established by that generation with the educational accomplishments in other countries. In Pensamiento pedagógico, Bernat Sureda Garcia, of Universitat de les Illes Baleares, dialogues with the Social History of Education, the Conceptual History, and the “supposedly forgotten” History of Pedagogy. From the same generation of Viñao, he unveils how their generation was faced by the challenge of reorganizing Spanish education in the post-Franco democracy, with all the political-ideological power in the debate. From this emerged his and his peers’ concern with the ideas, the individuals, groups, and sociability networks. One of the results of that type of inquiry in historiographic renovation in the country was the concern with teachers’ history from the analysis of autobiographies, memoirs, and diaries discussed by Aida Terrón Bañuelos, of Universidad de Oviedo. We can see a tension between teachers’ political and professional dimensions that would greatly define what would become the systematic study of their memories and their organizational places. Subjects of and subjected to all the logic of power that often challenges the imperatives of institutional politics.

The final chapter was written by the organizer of the book, Pedro Luiz Moreno Martinez. A longtime collaborator of Antonio Viñao, he deals with school memory and educational heritage, one of the areas in which Universidad de Murcia has most stood out in the Spanish historiographic movement of renovation. Besides bringing highly stimulating reflections on memory as an educational historic object, the author illustrates his considerations with examples from Museo Virtual de Historia de la Educación (MUVHE) and the Centro de Estudios sobre la Memoria Educativa (CEME), from that university. In his empirical examples, he reflects on the use of school notebooks and postcards as sources and documental heritage.

The volume finishes with a long “appendix” entitled Publicaciones de y sobre Antonio Viñao, which explores the vast interest of the author of books, chapters, articles, organizer of special issues, conferences, and interviews, including those published or held in Brazil (^{Taborda De Oliveira, 2010}; ^{Taborda de Oliveira & Faria Filho, 2011}; ^{Bastos, 2017}).

The work in its complexity allows a prosopographical gaze that articulates the personal trajectory of an important historian such as Antonio Viñao, without losing itself on the details of a laudatory memoir. Though it is a work that openly honors this singular character, it also articulates authors and themes around a recent past and the future of research in History of Education. To us, it may sound foreign, at first, or endogenous in its analysis, as the focus is in what we may call a Spanish tradition of History of Education. However, maybe due to the authors presenting and problematizing Viñao’s intellectual contribution, many of whom had become important references in the international debate in the field, or even, because the themes approached are among the one most developed in the last decades, it is a work that transcends Spanish borders and interests, at least, all those concerned with historiography.

In Brazil, as few people are dedicated to the study of education historiography, the value of the work is in allowing us to contrapose theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives against those offered by our Spanish colleagues. This is especially important, when considering the approximation of the bilateral relations established and strengthen in the last year, through research missions, joint publications, events organized, and the rise of studies on transnational histories.

Spain’s cultural and linguistic plurality and complexity raises inspiring challenges to those wishing to know the educational processes under historic lenses. The same can be said on the long and obscure dictatorial adventure that undermined some of the most innovative cultural, scientific, and educational Spanish experiences when of the nationalist victory headed by Franco in the Civil War in the second half of the 1930s. Considering their particularities and the risk of undue transposition, there is much to share on the art and the science of writing history in both countries. After all, considering the diversity and the polyphony of a country as Brazil, which also bled under an authoritarian tradition that frequently intends to nullify the common, the book of Pedro Luiz Moreno Martínez has much to say on the possibilities of writing history to understand the educational phenomena as a emancipatory power or a way to conform bodies and consciousness when faced by political-ideological constraints of authoritarian character.

The many facets of Antonio Viñao stream in the rich spring of research possibilities offered by our Spanish colleagues throughout this stimulating work. All chapters offer plenty of bibliographical, theoretical, and documental references, many of which unknown to Brazilian researchers. They also provide solid reflections on the past and the future of History of Education, a field in which Viñao is a great part, be it in Spain or worldwide. Moreno Martinz’s proposal could not be more appropriate. Creator and creature, Antonio Viñao and his trajectory, generously and critically analyzed in the polysemy of this volume, represent the redefinition of the shapes of making History of Education a field of reflection in which society, culture, and politics cannot be disentangled