The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

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I enjoy novels set in the medieval time period. Although I would not claim to have completed an exhaustive study, I dip into the genre regularly enough to know my way around the bookstore. For my money, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is one of the best on the list. Most reviews of this book focus on the murder mystery that drives the plot. This mystery is embedded into an imagined debate between the two sides of a real-life disagreement within the world of the Catholic Church on the question of poverty. The embedding works well. The mystery and its resolution are clever and engaging. The book is about more than a mystery, though. Eco was reaching for a deeper point, using a traditional mystery format to keep the pages turning. I read the book as a telling of a certain worldview, as explicated in the denouement argument between William of Baskerville and Jorge of Burgos, which could be categorized a conversation between orthodoxy and heresy, past and future, darkness and enlightenment. William of Baskerville seems to be a fictional stand in for William of Occam by way of Sherlock Holmes, or maybe for Umberto Eco himself, while Jorge of Burgos represents medieval orthodoxy. The imagined conversation lays out competing world views. Both Jorge and his views end up consumed by fire, so I think we can intuit both Eco’s opinion as well as see a rendering of the passing of one world as a new one dawned. But Eco’s novel doesn’t bid good riddance to the medieval period. Eco portrays the splendor of the medieval world through his minute construction of a monastery beautiful and perfect in its layout, one that runs smoothly and self-sufficiently, an entire world contained in its walls which so happen to enclose the finest library in all of Christendom. While the medieval world dies, consumed in a fire lit by a new enlightening, it dies, as all things must, so that the next world can build on its achievements, advance its advances, and continue the necessary human march towards the dawn of a better day.

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