Movies - The Name of the Rose

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	Movies - The Name of the Rose

The Name of the Rose, a 1980 novel by Umberto Eco, is a murder mystery set in an Italian monastery in the year 1327.

Plot introduction

Along with his apprentice Adso of Melk (named after the Benedictine abbey Stift Melk), the Franciscan monk William of Baskerville journeys to an abbey where a murder has been committed.

Plot summary

As the plot unfolds, several other people mysteriously die. The protagonists explore a labyrinthine medieval library, the subversive power of laughter, and come face to face with the Inquisition. It is left primarily to William's enormous powers of logic and deduction to solve the mysteries of the abbey.

On one level, the book is an excellent exposition of the scholastic method which was very popular in the 14th Century. William demonstrates the power of deductive reasoning, especially Syllogisms. He refuses to accept the diagnosis of simple demonic possession despite demonology being the traditional monastic explanation. Despite the abbey being under the misapprehension that they are experiencing the last days before the second coming of Christ (a topic closely examined in the book), William, through his empirical mindset, manages to show that the murders are, in fact, committed by a more corporeal instrument. By keeping an open mind, collecting facts and observations, following pure intuition and the dialectic method, he makes decisions as to what he should investigate, exactly as a scholastic would do. The story also demonstrates the crucial importance of chance in any investigative endeavour. Though William's theorized solutions do not exactly match the actual events of the cases, he could not have solved abbey's mysteries without them.

Characters in "The Name of the Rose"

William of Baskerville – main protagonist, a Franciscan monk
Adso of Melk – apprentice to William

Major themes

Eco, being a famous semiotician, is hailed by semiotics students who like to use his novel to explain their arcane discipline. The techniques of telling stories within stories, partial fictionalization, and purposeful linguistic ambiguity are prominent in Eco's narrative style. The solution to the central murder mystery hinges on the contents of Aristotle's book on Comedy, of which no copy survives; Eco nevertheless plausibly describes it and has his characters react to it appropriately in their medieval setting, which, however, though realistically described, is partly based on Eco's scholarly guesses and imagination. It is virtually impossible to untangle fact/history from fiction/conjecture in the novel.

Allusions/references to other works

The name of the central character, William of Baskerville, alludes both to the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes and to William of Ockham, who first put forward the principle known as "Ockham's Razor": often summarised as the dictum that one should always accept as most-likely the simplest explanation that accounts for all the facts. The name of the narrator, his apprentice Adso, is among other things a pun on Simplicio from Galileo Galilei's Dialogue; Adso = ad Simplicio ("to Simplicio"). It is also a play on Holmes' friend Dr. Watson.

As usual in Eco's novels, there is a display of erudition. The blind librarian Jorge from Burgos is a pun on Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, a major influence on Eco. Borges was blind during his later years and was also director of Argentina's national library; his short story "The Library of Babel" was a clear inspiration for the secret library in Eco's book. Eco spent some time at the University of Toronto while writing the book. The stairs in the monastery's library bear a striking resemblance to those in Robarts Library. Throughout the book, there are Latin quotes, authentic and apocryphal. There are also discussions of the philosophy of Aristotle and of a variety of millenarist heresies, especially those associated with the fraticelli. Numerous other philosophers are referenced throughout the book, often anachronistically, including Wittgenstein.

Allusions/references to actual history and current science

The book meticulously describes monastic life in the 14th century. The action takes place at a Benedictine abbey during the controversy between branches of Franciscans. The spirituals abhor wealth, bordering on the Apostolics or Dulcinian heresy. A number of the characters, such as the Inquisitor Bernard Gui and the Minorite Michael de Cesena, are historical figures, though the novels characterisation of them is not always historically accurate. The book also highlights a tension that existed within Christianity during the medieval era: the Spirituals, one faction within the Franciscan order, demanded that the Church should abandon all wealth, and some heretical sects began killing the well-to-do, while the majority of the Franciscans and the clergy took to a broader interpretation of the gospel.

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