PART 1 OF 2

Oh, but this is an exciting one! Any chance to talk about Eco and medieval reading cultures is a perfect way to start the day. The Name of the Rose is historical fiction, but Eco's knowledge of history is excellent, and the more you know of history, the more enriching reading his work becomes.

Preamble: As you probably know, monastic practices are not homogeneous. Even if we focus on a single order, once we go beyond their regula, it will be difficult to extrapolate from the practices of a single monastery something to be expected in the majority of monasteries. That caveat out of the way, let's dive in.

Context: The Name of the Rose is set in the 14th century, so let's say something about what monasticism looked like in this period. In the history of monasticism in the West, two major events provide important context for William and Adso's investigation. First are the Carolingian reforms of the 10th century. After the decline of the Western Roman empire but before this point, there was a great deal of diversity in the varieties and practices of monasticism in the West. This variety is due in great part to Irish monks who took to roaming around Gaul and Iberia (modern-day France and Spain) in an attempt to spread Christianity, each with their own way of doing things. In the 10th century, as part of the broader Carolingian Renaissance, the Carolingian emperor Louis the Pious decided that monasticism should be standardized, and monasteries were required to conform to the Rule of St. Benedict. On account of this standardization, the Benedictine order would come to be the dominate form of monasticism in the West for several hundred years. As such, they were a major focus of noble patronage and gift giving, leading to their accrual of vast wealth in many forms, including books. Benedictine scriptoriums as repositories for and producers of books were an important part to the intellectual life of the medieval era. It will come as no surprise that the monastery where The Name of the Rose takes place is Benedictine, and that it is marked by its wealth, prestige, and massive scriptorium.

The second important event to come will be the advent of the mendicant (or begging) orders. The two chief of such orders are the Franciscans and Dominicans, or the Order of Friars Minor and the Order Preachers, respectively. We could talk for ages about the rise of these orders and the contexts which brought it on, but for now note that their way of doing monasticism is very different from that of the Benedictine's. The most remarkable difference is their lack of wealth, which the Franciscans especially rejected, but another important classical difference was the absence of a vow of stability. Benedictine monks were members of a monastery and vowed to stay put. There are great stories from the life of St. Benedict about the dangers of the world outside the monastery and the tragedies which befell novices who strayed outside the walls without permission from the abbot. The mendicants, on the other hand, made no such vow, and were known to travel and wander, preaching and doing other such religious works, often to the consternation of established monasteries and local bishops, who didn't like religious things happening in their area without their consent. William is a Franciscan, who is asked to come investigate; in the story itself, Adso is a Benedictine novice, who is told to go by his superior and given permission to leave.

By the time of The Name of the Rose, there were a great many disputes going on among and about the Franciscans over the severity of their poverty and their rejection of private property. Accompanying these debates are "radical" spiritualist movements which caused a great deal of suspicion of Franciscans and lay religiosity. These debates over radical poverty and spiritualism are a major undercurrent to both the world and plot of The Name of the Rose.

Question: So, how tightly were these libraries controlled? Was the reading of fiction or pagan works tightly controlled? By the time of The Name of the Rose, so-called "pagan" works were in use among theologians, though not without controversy. Many works of Plato and Aristotle had been "re-introduced" to the West and had played an important part in Thomas Aquinas' (a Dominican) theorizing about the Eucharist as an exchange of accidents/essences. Again, such teachings and their use of "pagan" philosophy were not without controversy, but still it would be difficult to imagine a general animosity to their works being read. Likewise, fiction looms large in this period. Vernacular and courtly literature in particular are extraordinarily popular, and we see the developments of canons of fiction (i.e. works of fiction which respond to or presume their readers to have other works of fiction), indicating a culture of literary fiction. These works blend the religious and the secular in ways that rightly make us question the use of such categories. Barbara Newman's Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred is an excellent study in how the secular and sacred meet one another in literature during this broad period.