My copy of this book is now dog-eared and beaten. I think I must have read it about four or five times, and something new always strikes me each time. The film is fun, but much more superficial than the book.

Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is his most well-known novel, and it is still in print or can be found as a used book – Amazon among others. This work is fiction, and liberties have been taken with history, but that is artistic licence. The whole idea is a vast parable to teach us the limits of things like truth, belief, secrecy, reason, faith, whether it can be justified to kill another human being to protect a common good and many more things.

Here are some striking quotes for your meditation:

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Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.

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That man is … odd, I dared say to William. He is, or has been, in many ways a great man. But for this very reason he is odd. It is only petty men who seem normal.

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The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came.

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The hand of God creates; it does not conceal.

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There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but towards hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him.

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Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.