The Name of the Rose (Italian: Il nome della rosa [il ˈnoːme della ˈrɔːza]) is the 1980 debut novel by Italian author Umberto Eco. It is a historical murder mystery set in an Italian monastery in the year 1327, and an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies, and literary theory. It was translated into English by William Weaver in 1983.
The novel has sold over 50 million copies worldwide, becoming one of the best-selling books ever published. It has received many international awards and accolades, such as the Strega Prize in 1981 and Prix Medicis Étranger in 1982, and was ranked 14th on Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century list.
Plot summary
In 1327, Franciscan friar William of Baskerville and his assistant Adso of Melk arrive at a Benedictine abbey in Northern Italy to attend a theological disputation. The abbey is being used as neutral ground in a dispute between Pope John XXII and the Franciscans over the question of apostolic poverty.
The monks of the abbey have recently been shaken by the suspicious death of one of their brothers, Adelmo of Otranto, and the abbot asks William (a former inquisitor) to investigate the incident. During his inquiries, William has a debate with one of the oldest monks in the abbey, Jorge of Burgos, about the permissibility of laughter, which Jorge regards as a threat to God’s established order.
The second day, another monk, Venantius of Salvemec, is found dead in a vat of pig’s blood. He has black stains on his tongue and fingers, suggesting poison. William learns that Adelmo was part of a homosexual love triangle that also involved the librarian, Malachi of Hildesheim, and Malachi’s assistant, Berengar of Arundel.
The only other monks who knew about these indiscretions were Jorge and Venantius. In spite of Malachi’s ban, William and Adso enter the abbey’s labyrinthine library. They discover that the library contains a hidden room named the finis Africae after the presumed edge of the world, but they are unable to locate it. In the scriptorium, they find a book on Venantius’s desk along with some cryptic notes. Someone snatches the book and they pursue to no avail.
The third day, the monks are surprised by the disappearance of Berengar and William learns that there are two former Dulcinians in the abbey (Remigio of Voragine, the abbey’s cellarer, and the deformed monk Salvatore). Adso returns to the library alone in the evening. While leaving the library through the kitchen, he encounters a peasant girl. Although they do not share a language, they have a sexual encounter, Adso’s first. After confessing to William, Adso is absolved, although he still feels guilty.
The fourth day, Berengar is found drowned in the abbey’s bathhouse. His fingers and tongue bear stains similar to those found on Venantius. The pope’s legation now arrives, led by Grand Inquisitor Bernard Gui. Salvatore is discovered attempting to cast a primitive love spell on the peasant girl, and Bernard arrests them both for witchcraft and heresy.
The fifth day is the day of the disputation. Severinus, the abbey’s herbalist, tells William that he has found a “strange book” that demands the friar’s attention, but William is unable to investigate the discovery until the disputation has ended. When William and Adso arrive at Severinus’s laboratory, they find him dead, his skull crushed by a heavy armillary sphere.
They search the room for the missing book but are unable to locate it. Remigio is discovered at the scene of the crime and taken into custody by Bernard, who accuses the “heretic” of committing all four homicides. Under threat of torture, Remigio confesses. Remigio, Salvatore, and the peasant girl are taken away and assumed to be doomed. In response to the recent tragedies in the abbey, Jorge gives an apocalyptic sermon about the coming of the Antichrist.
At matins the morning of the sixth day, Malachi drops dead, his fingers and tongue black. The abbot is distraught at William’s failure to solve the crimes and orders him to leave the abbey the following day. That night, William and Adso penetrate the library once more and enter the finis Africae by solving Venantius’s riddle. They discover Jorge waiting for them in the forbidden room.
William has by now arrived at a solution. Berengar revealed the existence of the finis Africae to Adelmo in exchange for a sexual favour. Adelmo, stricken with guilt over this sinful bargain, then committed suicide. Venantius overheard the secret and used it to gain possession of a rare and valuable book that Jorge had hidden in the room. Unbeknownst to him, Jorge had laced its pages with poison, correctly assuming that a reader would have to lick his fingers in order to turn them.
Venantius’s body was discovered by Berengar, who, fearing exposure, disposed of it in pig’s blood before claiming the book and succumbing to its poison. The book was next found by Severinus, but Jorge manipulated Malachi into killing him before he could pass it on to William. Malachi died after ignoring Jorge’s warning not to investigate the book’s contents. The book itself, now back in Jorge’s possession, is the lost second half of Aristotle’s Poetics, which discusses the virtues of laughter.
Jorge confirms William’s deductions and justifies himself by pointing to the fact that the deaths correspond to the seven trumpets described in the Book of Revelation, and therefore must form part of a divine plan. Two more deaths will complete the sequence: that of the abbot, whom Jorge has trapped in an airless passageway beneath the finis Africae, and that of Jorge himself. He begins consuming the book’s poisoned pages and uses Adso’s lantern to start a fire in the library.
Adso summons the monks in a futile attempt to extinguish the fire. As the fire consumes the library and spreads to the rest of the abbey, William laments his failure. Confused and defeated, William and Adso escape the abbey. Years later, Adso, now aged, returns to the ruins of the abbey and salvages any remaining scraps and fragments, eventually creating a lesser library.
Characters
Primary characters
William of Baskerville – main protagonist, a Franciscan friar
Adso of Melk – narrator, Benedictine novice accompanying William
At the monastery
Abo of Fossanova – the abbot of the Benedictine monastery
Severinus of Sankt Wendel – herbalist who helps William
Malachi of Hildesheim – librarian
Berengar of Arundel – assistant librarian
Adelmo of Otranto – illuminator, novice
Venantius of Salvemec – translator of manuscripts
Benno of Uppsala – student of rhetoric
Alinardo of Grottaferrata – eldest monk
Jorge of Burgos – elderly blind monk
Remigio of Varagine – cellarer
Salvatore of Montferrat – monk, associate of Remigio
Nicholas of Morimondo – glazier
Aymaro of Alessandria – gossipy, sneering monk
Pacificus of Tivoli
Peter of Sant’Albano
Waldo of Hereford
Magnus of Iona
Patrick of Clonmacnois
Rabano of Toledo
Outsiders
Ubertino of Casale – Franciscan friar in exile, friend of William
Michael of Cesena – Minister General of the Franciscans
Bernard Gui – Inquisitor
Bertrand del Poggetto – Cardinal and leader of the Papal legation
Jerome of Kaffa (Jerome of Catalonia aka Hieronymus Catalani) – Bishop of Kaffa
Peasant girl from the village below the monastery
Major themes
Eco was a professor of semiotics, and employed techniques of metanarrative, partial fictionalization, and linguistic ambiguity to create a world enriched by layers of meaning. The solution to the central murder mystery hinges on the contents of Aristotle’s book on Comedy, which has been lost. In spite of this, Eco speculates on the content and has the characters react to it.
Through the motif of this lost and possibly suppressed book which might have aestheticized the farcical, the unheroic and the skeptical, Eco also makes an ironically slanted plea for tolerance and against dogmatic or self-sufficient metaphysical truths – an angle which reaches the surface in the final chapters.
In this regard, the conclusion mimics a novel of ideas, with William representing rationality, investigation, logical deduction, empiricism and also the beauty of the human minds, against Jorge’s dogmatism, censoriousness, and pursuit of keeping, no matter the cost, the secrets of the library closed and hidden to the outside world, including the other monks of the abbey.
The Name of the Rose has been described as a work of postmodernism. The quote in the novel, “books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told”, refers to a postmodern idea that all texts perpetually refer to other texts, rather than external reality, while also harkening back to the medieval notion that citation and quotation of books was inherently necessary to write new stories.
The novel ends with irony: as Eco explains in his Postscript to the Name of the Rose, “very little is discovered and the detective is defeated.” After unraveling the central mystery in part through coincidence and error, William of Baskerville concludes in fatigue that there “was no pattern.” Thus Eco turns the modernist quest for finality, certainty and meaning on its head, leaving the nominal plot—that of a detective story—broken, the series of deaths following a chaotic pattern of multiple causes, accident, and arguably without inherent meaning.
The aedificium’s labyrinth
The mystery revolves around the abbey library, situated in a fortified tower—the aedificium. This structure has three floors—the ground floor contains the kitchen and refectory, the first floor a scriptorium, and the top floor is occupied by the library.
The two lower floors are open to all, while only the librarian may enter the last. A catalogue of books is kept in the scriptorium, where manuscripts are read and copied. A monk who wishes to read a book would send a request to the librarian, who, if he thought the request justified, would bring it to the scriptorium. Finally, the library is in the form of a labyrinth, whose secret only the librarian and the assistant librarian know.
The aedificium has four
