The Name of the Rose

The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa, 1980) is Umberto Eco's first novel and one of the best-selling works of fiction of the late twentieth century. Set in November 1327, during the pontificate of John XXII, it follows Franciscan friar William of Baskerville, an English former inquisitor, and his young Benedictine novice Adso of Melk as they investigate a series of deaths in a remote abbey in northern Italy. The abbey is hosting a meeting between papal envoys and the Franciscan order to debate apostolic poverty, a doctrine the pope regards as dangerous, and as the gathering approaches the community is shaken by murders that the monks, led by the blind Jorge of Burgos, read as signs foretold in the Book of Revelation.

The story rests on a precise historical background. The dispute between the spiritual Franciscans and the papacy over the poverty of Christ and the apostles was one of the great controversies of the age, and the thinker William of Ockham played a prominent part in it. His nominalist and empiricist philosophy helped Eco shape his protagonist. William's sharp gaze and deductive method recall Sherlock Holmes, and his surname points to Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles. Eco originally meant to write a detective story, and the novel grew from an image: a monk who dies while reading a forbidden book. Before writing, he spent roughly a year drawing abbeys and labyrinths and imagining the medieval world, which allowed him to render the setting with great precision.

The book is also a novel of ideas. Dense with quotations from medieval authors and intellectual allusions, Eco conceived it as an open work with several levels of reading: the naive reader can follow the mystery, while the attentive reader notices the games, the irony and the references. Its learned character and metafictional tone have made it a landmark of postmodern literature. The central enigma revolves around a lost book, the second part of Aristotle's Poetics, devoted to comedy and laughter, and the story sets William's investigative reason against Jorge's dogmatism, which defends the library's secrets at any cost. As Eco notes in his Postscript, the detective is ultimately defeated, since the inquiry does not reach a complete truth.

The novel was a huge popular success and won the Strega Prize in 1981 and the Prix Médicis Étranger in 1982. In 1986 Jean-Jacques Annaud adapted it for the cinema, with Sean Connery as William. In 1987 Eco published Reflections on The Name of the Rose, explaining how and why he wrote it without revealing its mysteries.