You need the Key to the Name of the Rose. Amazon sometimes sells it, sometimes not. I wasn't smart/literate/motivated enough to read the novel without the Key. Note that Postscript to the Name of the Rose is not the same as the Key; if you really like Rose you may like the Postscript, but you probably won't read Rose without the Key. Key translates all the non-English, illuminates the history, and explains the dynamics.

You can sort of skip the first 50 pages or so...they're all about a bunch of religious conflict that you may or may not care about. I did so, then after I fell in love with the novel, I went back and, Key in hand, slowly read the beginning. I've heard it said, but cannot prove, that Eco was not interested in a blockbuster and wanted to have a slow slog at the beginning as the "price of admission." Remember, you heard it on the internet so salt etc...but it worked for me. I actually re-read the novel twice after my first very slow reading and plan on revisiting it soon.

The Rose by any name is always the same.

This book is everything the "DaVinci Code" pretended to be. And oh so very very much more. The DaVinci Code is stale pop rocks to Eco's exquisite cannoli. Cannoli dolci, rivetingly rich and complex. But your palate has to be ready for the experience- if all you've known is pop rocks, you won't taste it well. You may be overwhelmed.

Umberto Eco is an Italian professor of semiotics and esoterica, as well as a sometime novelist. This book is his pulp masterpiece, one which will persist and translate down generations, becoming a minor classic to equal triumphs such as Ben Hur, the Scarlet Pimpernel, or the Four Feathers. Like those other pulp classics, The Name of the Rose already has one film version made of it - One starring Sean Connery & Christian Slater. See it, it's good, but nowhere as sweet as the book. Mark this: Hollywood being as creatively bankrupt as it is, this glorious story will be revisited.

In any case, unlike those books, Eco's is heavily levened with philosophic and historical references, which if you pursue them, will - no joke - give you at least a semester's worth of quality undergraduate education in the humanities.

To the story: Umberto's hero, Brother William, is a Franciscan monk in the mold of St. Bonaventure & Roger Bacon, one of those early mystical empiricists for whom light - and hence the entire material world which was revealed in it - was a testament of the Living God Whom illumines all things, and Who clarifies all thought.

This same science - Bacon's empiricism, and the Franciscans' fascination with optics (manifested especially in an obsession with grinding lenses, as Br. William has in the book) feeds the rise of modern astronomy, and hence Brahe, Kepler, Copernicus & Galileo.

The book begins with William's novice Adso, narrator of the story, quoting the first verse of the Gospel of St. John: "In the beginning was the Word.. and the Word was God." In the ensuing narrative, set in one of those grand medieval monasteries which translated classical thought - Greek, Latin & Hebraic - unto the Germans, thus creating the modern world; the monastery along with its library (one of the largest collections of manuscripts in late medieval Europe) is burnt to the ground.

Thus the word is set alight, consumed, and then extinguished. The skeins of vellum (skin, or flesh) upon which the scribes inscribed the knowledge were thus reduced to ash, dust. To nothing. Meaning disintegrated, annihilated. Returned to dust. Embers left frigid, encased in icy Alpine snows.

The fact that William, a student of that other seminal Franciscan influence on modern science, William of Occam (Occam's Razor ring a bell?) uses empirical methods to discern who commits this atrocity, and all the other crimes committed in the story, is significant. For, even though William is an exquisite scientist, in the end it is all fruitless. The criminal escapes human justice, and human truth is annihilated. It is all fleeting, insubstantial.

Adso ends his story with a modified quote from St. Bernard of Clairvaux: "Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus," which means : "The Rose stands in its ancient name, naked names are all we have."

(In St. Bernard's original, the word "Rosa" was written "Roma," I believe.. But what ever could have Holy Bernard meant by that??? How strange.. Seriously.. the Middle Ages were so very very much more interesting than what they will ever teach you in school. Catholic triumphalism, Protestant black legends, and secularist sneering aside. If you want to understand the modern world, what & who we are, understand Bernard. Whatever was the problem he had with Abelard, anyway?)

In any case: "nomine nuda tenemus" - This is nominalism. The rejection of the universal; of mystical integral s

This comes from a long-time Eco/The Name of The Rose fan.. You come to realize that this book is not the easiest to read, you find stories and descriptions in it that sometimes are extremely long and exhausting, sometimes you might struggle with the fact that the whole story is fictious though claimed to be partly a true story.

But then, what you get is a great novel filled with mysteries and lessons of our history. Great characters that I find so easy to relate to. You learn about semiotics too (science that I always found fascinating), and most of all 'The Rose' will guide your way to become an investigator and more observant reader - if that is something you desire! Read it!

The name of the rose is one of those books that when you start reading them appear to be somewhat boring. But it was definitely not. Life in monasteries during the middle ages is incredibly depicted, and Umberto Eco builds a story of increasing mistery page after page.
Murders, passion, religion, philosophy and love are mixed to give birth to an astonishing book. Of course, you have to cope with many latin citations to fully understand the plot.

Set in an Italian abbey in 1327, The Name of the Rose takes place during "the Babylonian Captivity," a seventy-year period in which the popes were French and the Holy See was transferred from Rome to Avignon. In this time of immense turmoil, monastic orders competed for influence, both temporal and spiritual. Some orders were declared heretical, and ecclesiastical trials for heresy reflected the struggle for power as much as they did the very real philosophical conflicts. Italian, French, and German emperors competed for political domination, and the often hostile relationships among the papacy, holy orders, and various emperors made monastic life anything but tranquil.

When William of Baskerville is sent to the abbey to investigate charges of heresy, he and a novice, who is the narrator of the story, must also investigate a series of murders, one a day for the week William is present. William believes that these murders are connected to the "heretical" philosophies and hidden religious agendas to which some monks are passionately committed. Some of these unusually pious monks have, over the years, gained control of the abbey's vast library, thereby controlling access to knowledge. The library, built as a labyrinth with books organized according to a secret plan, is off limits to William. Believing that the deaths in the abbey are somehow connected to heresy and to mysterious books hidden in the library, William must investigate secretly, his investigation a philosophical one as much as it is a search for the killer or killers.

Eco creates an exciting and extraordinarily complex mystery which serves as the framework for an in-depth portrait of monastic life in the fourteenth century. His ability to convey atmosphere and to create two sympathetic characters in William and his novice allow the reader to glimpse and actually feel what monastic life must have been like almost seven hundred years ago. All the European conflicts of the period come to life and the reader feels their overwhelming effect on the daily lives of real men dedicated to the church but struggling with private issues of sin and guilt.

Challenging, thought-provoking, and immensely satisfying in many ways, this grand-scale novel is also filled with distracting arcana, much of it interesting but unrelated to the basic story. While every mystery has "red herrings" and false leads, Eco too often requires the reader to examine minute philosophical and religious arguments for clues which are not there. Some passages are written in Latin, and the conflicts between various monastic orders are described in sometimes excruciating detail. This grand and unusual mystery/philosophical investigation is filled with fascinating characters who bring the period to life, but it does contain significant amounts of extraneous detail which will frustrate some readers. (4.5 stars) n Mary Whipple