”a tibia of Saint Margaret,” “a rib of Saint Sophia,” “the chin of Saint Eobanus,” “a tooth of the Baptist,” “Moses’ rod,” “a tattered scrap of very fine lace from the Virgin Mary’s wedding dress”-and much, much more. No less marvelous, in the vanished monastery we find their counterparts in a guarded reliquare displaying “the tip of the spear that pierced the side of the Saviour!,” “a yellowed shred of the tablecloth from the last supper,” “a piece of the manger of Bethlehem,”. and those whose soles are reversed so that, following them by their footprints, one arrives always at the place whence they came and never where they are going.”
blemyae, born headless, with mouths in their bellies and eyes in their shoulders. There were monsters in the imagination in those days: “The cynocephali, who cannot say a word without barking. In a time of diminishing belief, all hands reach desperately from the encroaching shadows of doubt. He paints a time of multiple popes and multiple anti-Christs, a time when a man would trade sexual favors for a book, when the papal palace in Avignon displaced “crucifixes where Christ is nailed by a single hand while the other touches a purse hanging from his belt, to indicate that he authorizes the use of money for religious ends.” If you had a romantic notion of the relative simplicity of the late Middle Ages, Eco modernizes your view. Now “everything looked the same as everything else,” and all morality is arbitrarily and universally metamorphosed. Through the course of their investigations of the abbey’s crimes and its secret heresy, we’re given the flavor of the waning Middle Ages in Southern Europe, the ephemeral unity of medieval thought under the Thomistic rule had long since been abandoned as a possibility, and Aquinas himself, suspected of having been a self-important windbag. Like Joyce’s Dedalus, he studies the world’s signs and cluse with eyes both open and closed his vision is so exhaustive-literally and metaphorically-that he at one point sees through six eyes. William is friend of Occam, admirer of Bacon, devotee of Aristotle, and consumate practitioner of Thomistic analysis. A series of grisly murders turns Brother William of Baskerville, and his assistant Adso (our narrator), into prior-day Sherlock Holmes and Watson. Eco makes his intellectual riddles accessible by weaving them into an intriguing detective story. We see how the labyrinth operates on more than one level-in our imitative act of finding our way in and out. We learn the markings, deconstructing the book as we read.
Filled with the good-natured polyglot banter of the superfluosly learned, “The Name of the Rose” might be seen only as a effete “Canterbury Tales” except for tell-tale markings on the walls of its medieval monastic library, markings declaring that this records of those walls’ destruction is itself a labyrinth in the library’s image.
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