The Name of the Rose

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For the feature-length film of the same story, see The Name of the Rose (film).

For the unrelated 2003 short film, see Name of the Rose (2003).

<tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align: center;">Image:The Name of the Rose.jpg</td></tr> <tr><th>Original title (if not in English)</th><td>Il nome della rosa</td></tr><tr><th>Country</th><td>Italy</td></tr><tr><th>Language</th><td>Italian</td></tr><tr><th>Genre(s)</th><td>Historical novel, Mystery</td></tr> <tr><th>Media Type</th><td>Print (Paperback)</td></tr><tr><th>Pages</th><td>512 p. (paperback edition)</td></tr><tr><th>ISBN</th><td>ISBN 0-15-144647-4 (paperback edition)</td></tr>

**The Name of the Rose**
Author	Umberto Eco
Publisher	Harcourt (1983)
Released	1980

The Name of the Rose, a novel by Umberto Eco, is a murder mystery set in an Italian monastery in the year 1327. First published in Italian in 1980 under the title Il nome della rosa, it appeared in 1983 in an English translation by William Weaver.

1 Plot summary
2 Characters in "The Name of the Rose"
3 Major themes
4 Allusions/references to other works
5 Allusions/references to actual history, geography and current science
6 Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
7 See also
8 Trivia
9 External links

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

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

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 14^th 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 endeavor. Though William's theorized solutions do not exactly match the actual events of the cases, he could not have solved the abbey's mysteries without them.

[edit] Characters in "The Name of the Rose"

Primary characters

William of Baskerville – main protagonist, a Franciscan friar
Adso of Melk – narrator, Benedictine novice, and apprentice to William

At the monastery

Abbone of Fossanova – the abbot of the Benedictine monastery
Ubertino of Casale – Franciscan friar in exile, and friend of William
Severino of St Emmeram – herbalist
Malachias of Hildesheim – librarian
Berengario of Arundel – assistant librarian
Adelmo of Otranto – illuminator, novice, and first to die
Venanzio of Salvemec – translator of manuscripts
Bencio of Uppsala – student of rhetoric
Alinardo of Grottaferrata – eldest monk
Jorge of Burgos – elderly monk, and blind scholar
Remigio of Varagine – cellarer
Salvatore – monk, and associate of Remigio
Nicholas of Morimondo – glazier
Aymaro of Alessandria – gossipy, sneering monk

Outsiders

Michael of Cesena – leader of Spiritual Franciscans
Bernard Gui – inquisitioner, and leader of Papal legation
Bertrand del Poggetto – Cardinal and leader of the Papal legation
Peasant girl from the village below the monastery; maybe The Rose.

[edit] 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.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Allusions/references to other works

The name of the central character, William of Baskerville, alludes both to the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes (compare The Hound of the Baskervilles) and to William of Ockham (see the next section). 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.

[edit] Allusions/references to actual history, geography and current science

William of Ockham, who lived during the time of the novel, 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 (a method used by William of Baskerville in the novel).

The book meticulously describes monastic life in the 14^th century. The action takes place at a Benedictine abbey during the controversy surrounding the Apostolic poverty between branches of Franciscans and Dominicans (see Renewed controversy on the question of poverty.) 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 of Cesena, are historical figures, though the novel's characterization 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.

[edit] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

The Name of The Rose was also made into a film in 1986, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Sean Connery as William of Baskerville and Christian Slater as Adso.

A play adaptation in two parts was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 commencing Sunday 16 July 2006 and ending Sunday 23 July 2006.

[edit] See also

[edit] Trivia

Much attention has been paid to the mystery of what the title of the novel refers to. In fact, when he had finished writing the novel, Eco hurriedly suggested some ten names for it and asked a few of his friends to choose one. They chose "The name of the rose". Eco liked the choice because it seemed to him to be full of often contradictory meanings as indeed the rose has been a (rather too) frequently used symbol in the history of literature and mysticism.

The book's last line, "Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus" would roughly translate as "Of the rose of the past, we have only its name". The general sense, as Eco pointed out[1], was that from the beauty of the past, now disappeared, we hold only the name. This would be true to the Aristotle's lost book on comedy, whose last copy would now be forever lost, the exquisite library now destroyed, the beautiful peasant girl now dead. We only know them by the description Adso provides us - we only have the name of the book on comedy, not its contents. The original verse, written by XII Century monk Bernardo Morliacense in "De contemptu mundi", referred to Roma (Rome), not rosa (rose). Thus of the old Rome of legend, at Morliacense's days he knew only the name.

Eco is well-known for his perfectionism in writing his novels. For example, he spent a whole year drawing the plans of the abbey and the library, drawing all the monks' faces for himself in order to feel familiar in the world of the abbey into which he was to set his story.