Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose

Abstract

Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose represents a particularly fruitful text for jurisprudential investigation, first because of its author. Umberto Eco is Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna and a renowned leader in the field of semiotics and the philosophy of language. If anybody knows about literary theory and its uses, it is Eco. More precisely, as we discussed in chapter 2, Eco has advanced the idea of the ‘model reader’ as a means of determining the use of a text. More than anyone, perhaps, he has urged upon us the importance of the author in establishing the audience, if not the audience's interpretation. So in writing The Name of the Rose , Eco is writing with his model audience in mind. The novel is particularly fruitful, secondly, because Eco chooses to present a series of quasi-legal scenes, complemented by a constant discussion of philosophical and jurisprudential issues. Eco has consciously presented a particularly legal narrative. If we want to use it, and we feel that we can trust it, The Name of the Rose offers itself as a window into medieval jurisprudence, just as it does into contemporary theories of semiotics and language. If we, as a legal audience, learn nothing from Eco's novel, we can learn nothing from the study of literature.