Umberto Eco. The Name of the Rose. 1983; Translated by William Weaver, Everyman’s, 2006.

A friend recommended The Name of the Rose to me over thirty years ago. Chris, wherever you are, I finally read it!

I see why he liked it. It is very rich, allusive, and exotic. It is set in a time that even people in Italy seldom study or remember: the fourteenth century. This is about a hundred years before the invention of the printing press and nearly two hundred before the Reformation. Things in northern Italy, where it is set, have not changed much since the fall of Rome, but change is coming.

Friar William of Baskerville, our main character, uses spectacles to read. Now they had been invented some time before, but were still uncommon. Some of the monks at the abbey where he is staying consider them almost magical. As he arrives at the monastery, he tells some hostlers where a certain horse has escaped by reading hoofprints in the snow. Yes, he comes across as a medieval Sherlock Holmes. He gives credit to Roger Bacon, whom he has read and is seen as the originator of inductive reasoning (a.k.a. the scientific method) used today. Baskerville has less respect for William of Occam, whom he knew from Oxford.

The story is told by Baskerville’s traveling companion, a novice named Adso. Adso respects and admires Brother Baskerville and wants to learn from him. He asks him many questions and usually takes what he says at face value. In other words, he is a Watson to William’s Holmes.

Baskerville is a former inquisitioner and member of the Franciscans. The monastery is Benedictine, so there is both some mutual respect and also some rivalry. In the background are a number of groups trying to discover “genuine” Christianity including the Fraticelli offshoot of the Franciscans and the radical followers of Fra Dolcino. The Dolcinites would be considered heretical; the Fraticellis, reformers within the pale but suspect by some.

Other groups such as the Waldenses are mentioned as well. Like Chaucer in England, who sympathized with the Lollards, there are reformers everywhere it seems. The Church itself is worldly and political, but it would still take another two centuries before the Reformation would be institutionalized. But the seeds are there.

At one point the real Inquisition shows up. Unlike Baskerville, the inquisitioner from Avignon (based on historical figure Bernard Gui) is more interested in consolidating power and ecclesiastical order rather than discovering truth. Remigio, the poor monk snared by Gui, “now wants death with all his soul” (436)—not unlike Winston “He loved Big Brother” Smith. Plus ça change… (Interestingly, the story begins by the author’s tale of how he discovered Adso’s manuscript that includes a visit to Prague in 1968. He ends up trapped for a while after the Soviet army invades the country.)

Much of the tale, though, is intellectual. The abbey has one of the best collections of books in Europe. At one point it is compared to the Library of Alexandria. But no one is allowed in the library except the librarian and his one assistant. There is a catalog, but the librarian, perhaps under direction of the abbot, can decide what books can be checked out and by whom. Some are never allowed to be checked out.

As Baskerville says, “Knowledge is used to conceal, rather than to enlighten” here (200). Adso observes:

A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks. (208)

Adso and Baskerville sneak into the library one night, seeking both information on some books but also trying to solve one of the murders. The library turns out be arranged like a labyrinth. As a result, they are almost trapped in the library—if the librarian or abbot were to catch them there, they would be dismissed and probably the crimes would never be solved.

We meet monks from many parts of Europe including France, Spain, Germany, England, and Italy. (One thinks of The Magic Mountain, or how “all of Europe” contributed to Conrad’s Kurtz.) One is the old blind monk Jorge de Burgos, whose name suggests Jorge Luis Borges. That could tell the reader the kind of story The Name of the Rose is. And, yes, Borges’ most famous collection of tales is entitled Labyrinths, and one of its best known stories is “The Library of Babel.” The novel is allusive, but not all the allusions are to the Middle Ages.

As best I could tell, all the religious movements referred to were historical. So were the books mentioned. I do wonder about the some of the Arabic texts, but they could be authentic. I recognized a few titles. I was reminded of the books read by Roderick Usher in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Some were invented by Poe, but others such as Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell really exist. Some of the mystery here revolves around an ancient philosophical text known to have existed but lost to history, kind of like Shakespeare’s Love’s Labors Found (see Martin’s Harvard Yard).

The Name of the Rose is a gothic novel and a murder mystery, but it is clearly much more. It is not so much an intellectual challenge as an intellectual feast. What is truth? What is the nature of God? Can we really know what is true? What is objectivity? What did the ancients know that we have lost? What do we know that they did not?

There are many sayings in Latin and a few in other modern languages. Having taken a year and a half of Latin in college, I was able to muddle through most of the Latin. The French was fine for me. When I was stumped by a German quotation near the end, I discovered a web page that contained English translations of all the foreign quotations. I do recommend this to readers: “Translations to Accompany The Name of the Rose.”

The introduction by David Lodge to the Everyman’s Edition covers the story quite thoroughly. Because he says so much well, this review defers to his. I do recommend his advice to the first-time reader to stop at page xiv of the Introduction until after reading the novel to avoid spoilers. It also helps to reader to be familiar with the Bible, especially Revelation and the Gospel of John, though there are allusions to many books of the Bible including the Apocrypha.

This book is a gem. I confess being a little disappointed a the very end, only because it seemed to terminate in a kind of postmodern vagueness instead of a more typically Medieval point of view (think of Chaucer, Dante, Boccaccio, or especially Boethius). The author drops enough hints, though, about what will happen, if, as in a whodunit, we pay attention. It will keep readers thinking and keep researchers investigating. I am glad to have read it. It might even be worth a second look.