The Name of the Rose

The library of the abbey is in the form of a labyrinth, and only the librarian and his assistant, as well as the abbot himself, know its secrets. The library is the top floor of the Aedificium, a fortified tower, and it has a total of fifty-six rooms, each decorated with a scroll at the doorway that contains a verse from the Book of Revelation, most often referred to as the Apocalypse of John in the novel. The first letter of each verse is the letter corresponding to that room, and the letters of the adjacent rooms give the name of a region (e.g., Hibernia in the West tower) and those rooms contain books from that region. Two rooms have no lettering, the easternmost room which has an altar, and the central room on the south tower, the so-called finis Africae, which contains the most dangerous, and thus most heavily-guarded books. The entrance to this room is hidden behind a distorting mirror, and protected by a censer that is burning hallucinogenic herbs. The symbolic resonance of the labyrinth relates to many of the themes already discussed: the nature of authority; the dichotomies of reason and science; the power of artistic representation; the wisdom of the simple folk. Simply put, the labyrinth is the locus of multiple themes and myriad anxieties in this novel.

William’s eyeglasses engender wonder wherever he goes. In the scriptorium, the scholar-monks are amazed. And Nicholas the glazier, accustomed as he is to working with glass, is “dumbfounded” when he sees them—he has heard about the science of optics, and another monk had already described eyeglasses to him, but he had never seen them before. In their discussion of whether such “secrets of nature” are appropriate for man to learn, William claims that God gave man the use of reason in order to make his life better. Although Nicholas is worried, he does come around, and learns how to make eyeglasses when William’s are stolen. But William has always had to use caution when displaying the eyeglasses, and when they are stolen from the scriptorium, where William has left them, they become the locus of anxiety for him, and for the monk (Berengar) who stole them. They signify the power to read, and indeed, they are so powerful, William dared not show them during the years that he was an inquisitor, since many people would have considered them instruments of the devil. Thus, they are an important motif in the novel for exploring the limits of knowledge, the authority of God to limit man’s life, and the power of the Church to dictate the terms of human existence.