The philologist and eminent Cervantist Francisco Rico, who occupied the letter ‘p’ of the Royal Academy Spanish, died this Saturday in Barcelona at the age of 81 after having been in hospital for a few days, the RAE has reported.

Born in Barcelona on April 28, 1942, Rico, who was married to the philosopher and former socialist senator Victoria Camps, was elected academic on March 13, 1986 and took office on June 4, 1987 with the speech titled ‘Lázaro de Tormes and the place of the novel’, which was answered, on behalf of the corporation, by Fernando Lázaro Carreter.

Francisco Rico, who was a philologist and historian of literature from the Middle Ages to the Golden Age, has worked especially on Petrarch and early humanism in Italy and Spain, the Lazarillo de Tormes and Don Quixote. His last and most complete edition of this work was presented on June 23, 2015 at the RAE, and in May 2016, Francisco Rico was part of the academic delegation that delivered his two volumes to the Pope Francis in the Vatican.

Rich He directed the Classical Library collection of the Royal Academy Spanish (BCRAE), which includes, among its 111 titles, the complete works of Miguel de Cervantespresented in November 2019. Among his most important books are ‘The Spanish Picaresque Novel’ (1966), ‘The Picaresque Novel and the Point of View’ (1970), ‘Alfonso the Wise and the General Estoria’ (1972 ), ‘Life and work of Petrarch’ (1974), ‘Reading of the Secretum’ (1974), ‘Signs and indications on the cover of Ripoll’ (1976), ‘Nebrija against the barbarians’ (1978), ‘First quarantine’ (1982) and the ‘General Treatise on Literature’ (1982).

He is also the author of ‘Critical History of Spanish Literature’ (1980), ‘Brief Library of Spanish Authors’ (1990), ‘The Dream of Humanism’ (1993), ‘A Thousand Years of Spanish Poetry’ (1996) and ‘The discourses of taste. Notes on classics and contemporaries’ (2003).

The Council of Ministers on December 29, 2015 granted him the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Artsand in April 2016 he was invested honorary doctor cause by the University of Bologna (Italy).

In March 2017, he published ‘Anales Cervantinos’, a compilation of articles written in the newspaper El País – plus other unpublished texts – in 2015 and 2016, regarding the centenaries of Don Quixote and its author. In May 2018, his works ‘Paradojas del independence’ and ‘Writers in the autonomous community’ appeared. The literature gathering’ and in March 2022 he published ‘Lesson and inheritance of Elio Antonio de Nebrija’.

The Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), of which Rico was emeritus professor of Medieval Hispanic Literatures, has issued a message on his X account in which he also reports his death and expresses his condolences “to all the people” who knew and appreciated him, to the time that manifests that shares “the feeling for your loss”.