Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose
Second Day: Matins (pp. 101-0)
The body of Venantius is found in a tub of pigs' blood


The preceding study page was First Day: Compline (pp. 93-97).
Click here to return to the study page index.
Click here to return to the ENG 510 syllabus.
Address questions and comments to Professor Anderson.



Symbolism of the cock (p. 101): Eco here uses the theme of allegorical symbolism "in bono" (the cock as a symbol of the risen Christ) and "in malo" (the cock as a symbol of the devil. This is comparable to the ambiguous symbolism of the Aedificium as an image both of the City of God ("in bono") and of the Tower of Babel ("in malo") (p. 21). Severinus cites the dual meanings when he states that Greek "pharmacon" means both "poison" and "medicine" (p. 108). The dual symbolism of herbs appears metaphorically in Aymaro's warning to William that in the monastery, "during the day here the body is tended with good herbs, but at night the mind falls ill with bad herbs" (p. 1226). The library is said by Jorge to be "a testimony to truth and to error" (pp. 129, 130).

"The light, still absent" (p. 103): [Andrew Pegman comments] Adso has mixed emotions on being amongst the shrouded monks for the early morning prayer. The scene is cloaked in darkness, which portrays a feel of ominous foreboding and evil, though a very holy endeavor is occuring. Adso becomes especially uneasy at "the reading of the apocolypse" and it "seemed to me an ill omen that Rule should have set for that very day such a terrible admonition" (103). There is an ominous feel to the morning reading, but Adso takes heart and reflects that "the light, still absent seemed to shine in the words of the canticle" (103). Dante's "Divine Comedy" describes Beatrice as pure light, with no weight whatsoever. The abscence of light, or abscence of God's presence, seems to be a deliberate foreshadowing to the servants disrupting the prayer shouting, "A man! A dead man." (103). Upon hearing the news, Adso and William rush outside. The moment they leave the prayer room though,"The sky was now light." Thomas Cambell describes the scene best: "Coming events cast their shadows before" (Lochiel's Warning).

"Snow is parchment" metaphor (pp. 105-6): The metaphor makes a connection with "natural signs" (as the Stoics thought of them) and language as exemplary of signification.

"the prints of those noisy monks who have ruined our parchment" (p. 106): The source is Arthur Conan Doyle's "Bascombe Valley Mystery," where the footprints of local police and residents disturbed the crime scene, which otherwise was full of clues because the grounds around Bascombe Pool, where the murder occurred, was marshy. Another possible source is Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 3, where Sherlock Holmes refers to the Yew Alley on the Baskerville estate, where Sir Charles Baskerville has been walking at night when he was killed, as a "gravel page upon which I might have read so much"-- but the clues have "been long ere this smudged by the rain and defaced by the clogs of the curious peasants."

"deep tracks in the snow" (p. 106): This detail was anticipated by the sight of "hoofprints in the snow" in the Brunellus episode (p. 28), where the evidence or "sign" was undisturbed.

[Judith Bolinger comments] The relationship between Eco's Sleuth, Brother William of Baskerville and his Benedictine novice, Adso of Melk, is a playful take on Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. As in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, the narrator of Eco's book is the detective's sidekick.

The similarities of the relationships between the two pairs of men are illustrated in the following quotations. The first is from Eco's The Name of the Rose, and the second is from Conan Doyle's The Adventure of the Dancing Men.

"'A fine mess,'" William said (p. 105) [Judy Bolinger comments] Eco, with his delightful sense of humor and his keen sense of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories seems to be challenging us as to whether this scene sounds familiar. It is straight out of The Bascombe Valley Mystery (P 281-282) "...and there were marks of many feet, both upon the path and amid the short grass which bounded it on either side. Sometimes Holmes would hurry on...'Oh how simple it would all have been had I been here before they came like a herd of buffalo and wallowed all over it.'' Both detectives, William and Holmes, needed the information that footprints would give them. Both had to deal with many additional prints obscuring their evidence.

"Omnis mundi creatura . . ." (p. 106): [Marilyn Sutton comments] When William of Baskerville begins to talk of signs with regard to the death of Venantius, Adso, being the good student, recalls William's allusion during the Brunellus incident (p. 23) to a text from Alanus de Insulis ). The translation of the Alanus de Insulis text at the bottom of page 23 is:

Every creature of the world Like a picture and a book ==> Like a scripture and a book Appears to us as a mirror.

Here Adso misquotes Alain, changing in the second line the word pictura (picture) to scriptura (scripture). The message is slightly altered: every creature speaks to us like a scripture. Alain taught that God created Nature as man's intermediary. Perhaps Adso inadvertently is saying that the scriptures are also God's intermediaries.

Sources:
"Alain de I'Isle." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 1. Online edition. 1999. .
Haft, Adele J., Jane G. White, Robert J. White. The Key to the Name of the Rose. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. 100, 115-16.

Greek pharmacon meaning both "poison" and "medicine" (p. 108): the word is thus an exemplar of the dual meanings of symbols in bono and in malo, like the cock, cited by Adso at the beginning of this chapter (p. 101).

There is a parallel in the scholastic view of philosophy, such that "philosophy" is like "pharmacon," having meaning in bono and in malo. Humbert de Romans, Master General of the Dominicans in 1254-1263, wrote an influential Commentary on the Rule of St. Augustine (ca. 1256-1263), in which he allows that some friars are unsuited to the study of philosophy, and others can be allowed to study philosophy a little, under supervision, while still other friars should be given free rein to study philosophy as they will. Humbert's Commentary includes an exegesis of Collossians 2:8, "Beware lest any man deceive by philosophy and vain conceit." He argues that "just as a man cannot defend against fallacies, if he knows nothing about them, so can he not defend against such philosophers, if he knows nothing about philosophy. Then, in addition to defending against false philosophy, another result of studying philosophy is "the destruction of their errors. Amont the philosophers, there are many errors and many truths, just as there is both poison and its antidote in the serpent. And just as this antidote is more efficacious than all else against poison, so are their truths more effective in opposing their errors than are the truths of faith, for they do not accept the latter."

There is no reason the think that Eco was thinking of Humbert's Commentary at this point, of course. But in more general terms, William of Baskerville takes a position in favor of the study of philosophy, as the best defense against the expected Antichrist.

The next study page is Second Day: Prime (pp. 110-20)