The writer, historian, archivist and philologist Antoni de Bofarull i Brocà (Reus 1821 – Barcelona 1892) was one of the driving forces of the Catalan Renaixença movement. The aim of the whole of his public activity was to dignify Catalan as a literary language and to promote Catalan national pride, which could primarily be manifested through a knowledge of the historical and cultural personality of Catalonia.

In 1839 he began his law studies in Barcelona. Soon after, encouraged by the example of Joaquim Rubió i Ors, he published his first poems in Catalan in the press; He also wrote historical dramas with Catalan themes. In 1846 he entered the employ of the Aragon Royal Archive, and in the same year published Hazañas y recuerdos de los catalanes (“Achievements and memories of the Catalans”), a collection of historical legends. In 1848, with Marià Flotats, he edited James I’s Llibre dels fets (“Book of deeds”); at the insistence of his publishers, these books appeared in Spanish. In 1854 and 1855 he published a series of articles in the Diario de Barcelona vindicating the historical greatness of Catalonia and demanding the restoration of the Floral Games. In 1857 he delivered a prestigious public lecture on “The Catalan language from a historical perspective”, vindicating Catalan as independently and directly descended from Latin, disassociating it from Provençal and rejecting the then-current appellation “Limousin”.

Between 1858 and 1862 Bofarull made his most important greatest contributions to the emerging Renaixença. He published, under the title Los trobadors nous (“The new troubadours”), a collection of contemporary Catalan poems with the aim of showing the literary viability of the Catalan language. He played a key role in restoring the Floral Games in Barcelona (1859), the first public, official and regular platform for contemporary Catalan literature; and 1862 saw the publication of his L’orfeneta de Menargues o Catalunya agonitzant (“The orphan girl from Menargues or the death throes of Catalonia”), the first novel written in Catalan since the 15th century: a historical novel set at the time of the 1412 Compromise of Caspe.

The most important work of his final years was his volume of memoirs Costums que es perden i records que fugen: Reus de 1820 a 1840 (“Customs that are lost and memories that flee: Reus from 1820 to 1840”).

Critics have pointed out Bofarull’s political conservatism and the fact that he never strayed from a nostalgic and historicist cultural programme. In recent years, however, he has been reassessed in a more appreciative light.