Eco’s first novel, and a title that changes

The Name of the Rose, the notes write, was first a novel. It is Umberto Eco’s first long work of fiction, published in Italy in 1980, when he was fifty-two, and centred on the investigation of murders in a medieval Italian monastery. It has the look of a detective story, they say, but unlike historical novels that only replay past facts it also gives body to medieval theology, philosophy, and the Western classics, and to how people of that time understood their own history.

Through a week William and Adso spend in the monastery, the writer portrays medieval life, a world-view, disputes over heresy among the orders, and the inquisition, and so, the notes write, tells the grim history of a Europe in which religion bound human freedom. The first title, they say, was A Crime in the Abbey; it was later changed to The Name of the Rose, with the accumulated historical symbolism of the rose in mind.

Annaud, a memory around 1320, and a tower that cannot be approached

Jean-Jacques Annaud, the notes write, shaped the film so that the monk Adso looks back on what he lived through, with his teacher William, around 1320 in an Italian monastery. The film begins as William arrives with young Adso at a Benedictine house in northern Italy.

Shortly before they come, a young monk named Adelmo has fallen from a tower and died. The tower, they write, is a place one cannot approach, and its windows do not open, so the monks think the devil was involved in Adelmo’s death, and unrest spreads through the house. The abbot, when William and Adso arrive, asks William to take the investigation.

A first guess of suicide, then a jar of pig’s blood

Persuaded by the abbot, William looks over the place from which Adelmo threw himself, or seemed to, and first guesses that Adelmo took his own life. Soon afterward, the notes go on, another death occurs: a Greek translator is found dead, stuck upside down in a jar of pig’s blood.

As the deaths follow one another, the monks say a prophecy in Revelation has been fulfilled and fear that the devil’s work has begun. William, however, looks closely at footprints and concludes that this man was murdered. The notes stop on that conclusion; they do not carry the plot further.

The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of The Name of the Rose: Eco’s first novel of 1980, a first title about a crime in the abbey, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film around 1320, Adelmo’s fall, and a Greek translator found in a jar of pig’s blood.

Last updated: 15 November 2026