Knowledge in Name of the Rose

Knowledge in Name of the Rose

Knowledge was one of the most powerful tools of the middle ages. It was highly valued by many kings and members of nobility, but the greatest procurer of knowledge through the middle ages was undoubtedly the church. Their motive for the capturing of wisdom was not for their own enrichment, but predominantly self-preservation. If the general public were to get hold of such a wealth of philosophical and scientific works that were withheld in the monastic libraries then they would almost certainly begin to formulate their own religious ideas, therefore releasing the societal stranglehold the church held so tightly at that time. To survive the church had to keep the knowledge from the masses, and this is something that Umberto Eco has incorporated with finesse into his novel The Name of the Rose. Intertextuality, postmodernism, allusions and an array of interesting characters help to explain the state of education and the availability of knowledge in the middle ages.

The labyrinth is one of the most important aspects to the portrayal of knowledge in The Name of the Rose. Its design and purpose are a brilliant metaphor to the churches desire to keep knowledge from the poor and powerless. The story of the labyrinth goes right back to a Greek myth, which tells of a beast with the head of a bovine and the body of a man, who was conceived of a woman and a snow white bull. It was confined to a labyrinth from which there was no escape without assistance. The concept that Eco uses in The Name of the Rose is very similar, except instead of guarding the Minotaur, Eco’s labyrinth guard’s books, the knowledge that could be the destruction of the church’s vice-like grip upon society. The minotaur wanted seven young maidens and seven youths per year to quench it’s appetite, and one year the Greek hero Theseus became sick of the killing and offered himself as a sacrifice to the bull, with the intention of killing it. He went in with a ball of string and a sword, the ball of string he used to trace his path back to the start when he had killed the Minotaur. There are distinct parallels between William, and the hero Theseus. William entered the library with the intention of getting at the contents that it was protecting from society, which of course were the books, just as Theseus entered the Minotaur’s labyrinth to rescue the young men and w...

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...uld lead one to believe that Jorge is simply following the attitude of the church. This being that works which use methods to make their concepts especially easy to understand are very dangerous, and therefore they above all others should be prevented from circulation into society.

Umberto Eco has made the theme of knowledge a central subject within The Name of the Rose, and the literary techniques he uses as well as his highly complex characters are highly successful in conveying the way knowledge was treated in the era of great power that the catholic church held. The use of Sherlock Holmes in an intertextual sense and the consequent post-modern aspects of his amalgamation within the story are especially clever methods which serve to provide a very interesting tangent to the novel. The Name Of The Rose can be taken both on surface value as a typical crime story and from underneath as a wonderful political piece that embodies the attitudes of the time whilst still maintaining it’s ironic edge as a Sherlock Holmes murder thriller set in the early 1300’s, 500 years before Doyle’s work, and written in the 1980’s, some 100 years later than the Holmes mysteries were first published.