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

Knowl raciness in soma of the RoseKnowledge was ane of the most powerful tools of the middle ages. It was highly valued by galore(postnominal) kings and members of nobility, but the greatest procurer of intimacy through the middle ages was doubtlessly the church service. Their motive for the capturing of wisdom was not for their own enrichment, but predominantly self-preservation. If the planetary public were to get hold of such a wealth of philosophical and scientific works that were withheld in the monastic libraries then they would almost sure as shooting begin to formulate their own religious ideas, thitherfore releasing the social stranglehold the church held so tightly at that time. To survive the church had to keep the intimacy from the masses, and this is virtuallything that Umberto Eco has incorporated with finesse into his novel The Name of the Rose. Intertextuality, postmodernism, allusions and an army of interesting characters help to explain the state of educ ation and the availability of intimacy in the middle ages. The labyrinth is one of the most important aspects to the enactment of knowledge in The Name of the Rose. Its design and purpose are a brilliant metaphor to the churches desire to keep knowledge from the poor and powerless. The degree of the labyrinth goes right back to a Greek myth, which tells of a wildcat with the head of a bovine and the body of a man, who was conceived of a muliebrity and a snow white bull. It was confined to a labyrinth from which there was no escape without assistance. The concept that Eco uses in The Name of the Rose is in truth similar, except instead of guarding the Minotaur, Ecos labyrinth guards books, the knowledge that could be the destruction of the churchs vice-like grip upon society. The minotaur wanted septette youngish maidens and seven youths per course of study to quench its appetite, and one year the Greek hero Theseus became sick of the killing and offered himself as a pass to the bull, with the intention of killing it. He went in with a ball of train and a sword, the ball of string he used to trace his course back to the start when he had killed the Minotaur. There are distinct parallels amongst William, and the hero Theseus. William entered the library with the intention of getting at the contents that it was defend from society, which of course were the books, just as Theseus entered the Minotaurs labyrinth to rescue the young men and w... ...uld lead one to believe that Jorge is simply following the billet of the church. This being that works which use methods to make their concepts especially easy to date are very dangerous, and therefore they above all others should be prevented from circulation into society.Umberto Eco has make the theme of knowledge a central subject inside The Name of the Rose, and the literary techniques he uses as well as his highly heterogeneous characters are highly successful in conveying the way knowledge was treat ed in the era of great power that the catholic church held. The use of Sherlock 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 crime story and from underneath as a howling(prenominal) political piece that embodies the attitudes of the time whilst still maintaining its ironic edge as a Sherlock Holmes murder thriller set in the azoic 1300s, 500 years before Doyles work, and written in the 1980s, some 100 years later than the Holmes mysteries were first published.