The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
"The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco is a historical novel set in a Benedictine abbey in northern Italy during late November 1327. The story follows William of Baskerville, a learned Franciscan, and his young scribe, Adso of Melk, as they arrive at the abbey to facilitate a crucial meeting between the Pope's representatives and the Franciscans amidst political and religious turmoil. Their mission takes an unexpected turn when the body of a monk, Adelmo, is found dead, prompting investigations into whether it was murder or suicide. William is tasked with uncovering the truth while navigating the abbey's secrets, including access to its forbidden library, which becomes central to the unfolding mystery.
As more monks die under mysterious circumstances, the narrative explores themes of knowledge, power, and the consequences of forbidden truths. The conflict escalates with the arrival of an inquisitor, Bernard Gui, whose rigid perspective creates tensions that challenge William’s investigative methods. Ultimately, the story delves into philosophical questions about truth and interpretation, culminating in a dramatic conclusion where the fate of the abbey and its secrets lead to catastrophic outcomes. Eco weaves a complex tapestry of medieval life, blending mystery, intellectual discourse, and the interplay between faith and reason, inviting readers to reflect on the broader implications of knowledge and authority.
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The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
First published:Il nome della rosa, 1980 (English translation, 1983)
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Detective and mystery
Time of plot: 1327
Locale: Northern Italy
Principal characters
William of Baskerville , a Franciscan monk and former inquisitor, now a detectiveAdso of Melk , the narrator, a Benedictine novice assigned as William’s scribeAbo , the abbot of the Benedictine monasteryJorge de Burgos , an aged, blind monkMichael of Cesena , the leader of the Franciscan orderBernard Gui , a Dominican inquisitorThe Unnamed Editor and Translator ,
The Story:
It is in late November, 1327, that the learned Franciscan William of Baskerville, student of Roger Bacon and friend of William of Occam, arrives at a Benedictine abbey in northern Italy, accompanied by his young Benedictine scribe, Adso of Melk. William had been assigned the difficult task of arranging a meeting between representatives of Pope John XXII and the leader of the Franciscans, Michael of Cesena, at a time of great religious, political, social, and economic upheaval. The pope held the entire Franciscan order responsible for the extremist position on poverty held by its most radical members. The emperor supported the Franciscans, an odd alliance until one realized his motive: to weaken the pope’s power. The Benedictines also supported the Franciscans, but for a very different reason: They feared that a strong centralized Church, especially one located in Avignon, would undermine the spiritual and economic control that individual monasteries had long exerted over surrounding areas.
When William arrives, he is informed by the abbot of a recent event that, although not directly related to William’s mission, could threaten both its success and the abbot’s sovereignty. The body of a young and handsome monk, a master illustrator named Adelmo, had been found earlier that day. The abbot charged William with clearing up the mystery surrounding Adelmo’s death—whether it was murder or suicide—before the arrival of the papal legation. Although allowed considerable latitude in conducting the investigation, William is barred from entering the monastery’s great library located on the Aedificium’s top floor. The prohibition only piques William’s interest, especially when the body of another monk connected with the library, the Greek scholar Venantius, is found head down in a great jar filled with pigs’ blood the very next day. The old monk Alinardo sees in the two deaths signs of the apocalypse announced in the book of Revelations. William does not believe that the end is near, but he does believe that the book of Revelations has something to do with the deaths. As a result, he becomes even more determined to penetrate the mysteries of the forbidden, labyrinthine library.
Adso finds his naïve faith just as challenged as William’s wits, first by his master’s revelations, then by his own curiosity. The abbey, he learns, is not a world apart from, but a microcosm of, the secular world outside its walls. Divine order and absolute truth give way to human-made, relativistic pronouncements and interpretations. Adso proves only slightly better at resisting these seeming snares than he does the sexual advances of the young woman he comes upon in the kitchen one night after becoming separated from William during one of their forays into the library. After first transmogrifying her into the whore of Babylon, Adso’s fevered, book-bound imagination transforms her into the beauty extolled in the Song of Songs.
Adso’s postcoital reverie is cut short by the discovery of a third corpse—the second with mysteriously blackened fingers—and the arrival of the papal legation led by the infamous inquisitor Bernard Gui. In the world according to Gui, a man more inquisitorial than inquisitive, all is clear, despite the fog that has descended on the abbey. The girl is not an impoverished peasant but a witch; Remigio is not a lustful cellarer who has his assistant, the grotesque and babbling Salvatore, procure village girls willing to exchange their virtue for bits of meat, but a heretic and the murderer of all four monks, the herbalist Arvenius being his most recent victim. The death of a fifth monk, the illiterate librarian Malachi, provides the most visible proof of the inadequacy of the inquisitor’s theory. Much to Adso’s dismay, it does not prove the girl’s innocence; she is, William claims, “dead meat” whom Adso would do well to forget.
Adso does not save the girl, but he does save the day with the chance remark that provides William with the clue he needs to solve yet another of the library’s mysteries. Once again, however, solving a mystery does not save a life, that of the abbot sealed in a secret stairway leading to the library. This William learns when he finally reaches the library’s Finis Africae and confronts his nemesis, the blind monk Jorge de Burgos, mastermind of the murders, although not technically a murderer. Just as William suspects, all the victims died for lust: in some cases sexual, in others intellectual. Most died by their own hand, three of them literally so, wetting their fingers before turning the fatal book’s poisoned pages. This was the book that Jorge was determined no one else should ever read, the one hidden away in the library’s labyrinthine recesses. It was bound with a number of other very different manuscripts, each in a different language: the manuscript
in Greek, made perhaps by an Arab or by a Spaniard, that you found when, as assistant to Paul of Rimini, you arranged to be sent back to your country to collect the finest manuscripts of the apocalypse in Leon and Castile.
It was not a manuscript that deals with the Apocalypse, but one that Jorge fears would bring about a more catastrophic end than the one foretold in the book of Revelations.
Although his lust for books prevents him from destroying it, Jorge greatly feared the consequences should this “second book of the Poetics of Aristotle, the book everyone has believed lost or never written, and of which you hold perhaps the only copy,” become known. Jorge believes that Aristotle had, through Thomas Aquinas’s writings, already undermined the Church’s teachings and authority. What he fears even more is the manuscript’s elevating comedy to the level of art, thus giving it a power far greater than the heresies and carnival inversions whose subversive potential the Church could control. In a final act of defiance—at once horrific, childish, and comic—Jorge destroys the manuscript and himself by eating its poisoned pages and then accidentally starting the fire that destroys first the library and then the entire abbey: endgame becomes Armageddon in the tale’s fiery conclusion.
Bibliography
Bouchard, Norma, and Veronica Pravadelli, eds. Umberto Eco’s Alternative: The Politics of Culture and the Ambiguities of Interpretation. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Collection of essays analyzing Eco’s fiction and scholarly works. “Desperately Seeking Satan: Witchcraft and Censorship in The Name of the Rose” discusses this novel.
Capozzi, Rocco, ed. Reading Eco: An Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Essays by some of the top Eco scholars exploring his ideas about literary semiotics and analyzing how these concepts are expressed in both his fiction and scholarly writing. Includes three essays on The Name of the Rose by Teresa De Lauretis, David H. Richter, and Thomas Sebeok.
Coletti, Theresa. Naming the Rose: Eco, Medieval Signs, and Modern Theory. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988. Discusses Eco’s mingling of medieval and modern and what this means in the light of the novel’s reception.
Eco, Umberto. Postscript to “The Name of the Rose.” San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. In the spirit of Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition,” Eco discusses how the novel came to be written, not how it should be read.
Farronato, Cristina. Eco’s Chaosmos: From the Middle Ages to Postmodernity. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Farranato examines the tension between cosmos and chaos, or “chaosmos,” and the struggle for a composition of opposites in Eco’s work, including The Name of the Rose.
Ford, Judy Ann. “Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose.” In The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction, edited by Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000. Eco’s novel is included in this study of detective stories set in various eras of history.
Haft, Adele J., Jane G. White, and Robert J. White. The Key to “The Name of the Rose.” Harrington Park, N.J.: Ampersand, 1987. A useful source that identifies the novel’s literary references and provides translations of all non-English passages.
Inge, M. Thomas. Naming the Rose: Essays on Eco’s “The Name of the Rose.” Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988. Ten essays with a foreword by Eco, a reader-response postscript, and a useful annotated checklist of English-language criticism.
Richter, David H. “Eco’s Echoes: Semiotic Theory and Detective Practice in The Name of the Rose.” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 10, no. 2 (Spring, 1986): 213-236. Densely detailed and finely argued discussion of the relation between Eco’s parodic novel and semiotic theory.