Eco's most famous novel, Il nome della rosa (1980, The Name of the Rose), is a murder mystery set in an Italian abbey in the year 1327. During the medieval period, the power of life and death lies with the Inquisition. A breakaway sect called the Fraticelli is one of those factions that threaten the wealth and political influence of the Church.
A number of murders occurred at the Italian monastery. William of Baskerville, accompanied by his apprenticee Adso of Melk, tried to prove that a series of murders is not committed by the Devil. As the story unfolds, they later find out that the blind librarian Jorge de Burgos – derived from the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges - is behind the killings. He did the ghastly act to protect Aristotle's missing manuscript about comedy, the lost second book of Poetics. The abbey library and monastery was burned down and the manuscript disappears.
In “The Name of the Rose” Eco also explores the diversity, contradictions, and complexity of the medieval world, and in the course of doing so raises questions about our own: not least, from the library, repository of past learning and current speculation, about what constitutes culture, what is transmitted, by whom and for what purposes." (Contemporary World Writers, ed. by Tracy Chevalier, 1993) - "In essence, the basic question of philosophy (as of psychoanalysis) is the same as that of the detective novel: who is guilty? To know the answer (to think you know) you have to conjecture that the facts possess a logic - the logic that the guilty party has imposed on them." (from Postille a 'Il nome della rosa', transl. by Michael Dibdin, 1993)
In “The Name of the Rose”, right or wrong, the murderer actually believes that he was doing someone a favor. The murder is a means for achieving a good end, which is actually ironic.
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