Knowledge in Name of the Rose Essay -- English Literature Essays

association in Name of the RoseKnowledge was one of the most decent tools of the spunk ages. It was super valued by many kings and members of nobility, but the greatest procurer of noesis through the middle ages was undoubtedly the church. Their motive for the capturing of firmness was not for their own enrichment, but predominantly self-preservation. If the general public were to she-bop hold of such a wealth of philosophical and scientific plant life that were withheld in the monastic libraries then they would almost certainly begin to hypothesise 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 kindle characters foster to explain the state of education and the availability of kno wledge 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 ar a brilliant simile to the churches desire to keep knowledge from the poor and powerless. The story of the labyrinth goes skillful 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 bamboozle white bull. It was confined to a labyrinth from which there was no get off without assistance. The concept that Eco uses in The Name of the Rose is very similar, except instead of guarding the Minotaur, Ecos labyrinth guards books, the knowledge that could be the remainder of the churchs vice-like grip upon society. The minotaur wanted septette young maidens and seven youths per year to quench its appetite, and one year the Greek hired gun Theseus became sick of the cleanup spot and offered himself as a sacrifice to the bull, with the intention of kill ing it. He went in with a crackpot of string and a sword, the ball of string he used to trace his path back to the scratch 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, safe as Theseus entered the Minotaurs labyrinth to rescue the young men and w... ...uld predate one to believe that Jorge is simply following the attitude of the church. This being that workings 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 grea t power that the catholic church held. The use of secret agent 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 shame story and from underneath as a wonderful political darn that embodies the attitudes of the time whilst still maintaining its ironic edge as a Sherlock Holmes murder thriller set in the early 1300s, 500 geezerhood before Doyles work, and written in the 1980s, some 100 days later than the Holmes mysteries were first published.