DOCSLIB.ORG

History 400 Medieval Science, Technology and Magic the Name

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
History 400 Medieval Science, Technology and Magic the Name History 400 Medieval Science, Technology and Magic The Name of the Rose Paper Please write a 5-7 page paper evaluating how Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose, helps us to understand medieval attitudes towards reason and not-reason, knowledge and learning, God and the Devil, the natural and the supernatural. How does this fit in with the readings that we have done so far in the class? A good paper will move back and forth between the artificial scenario created by Umberto Eco and the texts we have read thus far. Background1 Ubertino de Casale, Bernardo Gui, Michael of Cesena, and Fra Dolcino (leader of "Dolcinite" heretics prosecuted by Bernardo Gui) are all genuine historical figures who acted pretty much in the way Eco describes in his book. William of Baskerville, Adso, and Jorge, on the other hand, are all imaginary figures. It is not important that you know who "was real" and who is imaginary. All you really need to know is that the background political events as Eco sketches them really did take place, and that the religious and intellectual issues raised here are very much grounded in some kind of historical reality. The Apocalyptic theme: At the beginning of the book (set in the year 1327), a series of murders at an Italian abbey is thought to be connected to events predicted in the Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse, the final book of the Christian Bible. This is important not only because of the way it sets up the theme of superstition vs. reason, but also because apocalypticism (belief that the end is really near) was central to the religious/historical context of thirteenth- and fourteenth century Europe. During the course of the thirteenth century, the apocalyptic teachings of a twelfth- century Calabrian abbot, Joachim of Fiore (1132-1202), gained widespread acceptance in Italy and beyond. In brief, Joachim divided the history of the Church into three distinct ages corresponding to the persons of the Trinity: that of the Father (from the covenant with Abraham to the passion of Jesus Christ), that of the Son (after Christ, in which mankind lives under the grace of the New Testament, or Covenant), and that of the Spirit (which is yet to come and which will be lived in the freedom of the Holy Spirit). Joachim calculated that the final age would begin in the year 1260, though his teachings continued to be important even after that date passed without any obvious cataclysm. The beginning of the age of the Spirit was to be marked by the emergence of new religious orders who would help convert the entire world to true Christianity and usher in a new Spiritual Church. Not only were many of the heretics referred to in The Name of the Rose radical Joachites (fervent believers in the 1 Courtesy of Prof. Deeana Klepper, Boston University. immediate/imminent arrival of Joachim©ˆs final age), but the entire Franciscan order was heavily under the influence of Joachimism. Under this Joachite scheme, the present was historicized, and Francis became both Moses and Christ as well as the "angel of the sixth seal" of Revelation, the herald of the final age, the apocalyptic figure par excellence. The Joachite Spirituals "knew" that a battle between the forces of Christ (them) and antichrist (their opponents within the Church) was afoot, and interpreted political events according to this scheme. The Three Religious Orders: Eco presents Bernardo Gui as a counterpoint to Brother William, one epitomizing medieval superstition against the other’s representation of emerging rationality. Jorge represents yet a third alternative to the Franciscan and Dominican face off between Bernardo and William--traditional monasticism. You might want to pay attention to distinctions drawn between the orders, particularly in regard to their attitudes towards learning and knowledge. However, please keep in mind the fictional nature of the book: it would be misguided to think that all Dominicans thought like Bernardo, or all Franciscans like William. .
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Beyond the Bosphorus: the Holy Land in English Reformation Literature, 1516-1596
    BEYOND THE BOSPHORUS: THE HOLY LAND IN ENGLISH REFORMATION LITERATURE, 1516-1596 Jerrod Nathan Rosenbaum A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2019 Approved by: Jessica Wolfe Patrick O’Neill Mary Floyd-Wilson Reid Barbour Megan Matchinske ©2019 Jerrod Nathan Rosenbaum ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Jerrod Rosenbaum: Beyond the Bosphorus: The Holy Land in English Reformation Literature, 1516-1596 (Under the direction of Jessica Wolfe) This dissertation examines the concept of the Holy Land, for purposes of Reformation polemics and apologetics, in sixteenth-century English Literature. The dissertation focuses on two central texts that are indicative of two distinct historical moments of the Protestant Reformation in England. Thomas More's Utopia was first published in Latin at Louvain in 1516, roughly one year before the publication of Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses signaled the commencement of the Reformation on the Continent and roughly a decade before the Henrician Reformation in England. As a humanist text, Utopia contains themes pertinent to internal Church reform, while simultaneously warning polemicists and ecclesiastics to leave off their paltry squabbles over non-essential religious matters, lest the unity of the Church catholic be imperiled. More's engagement with the Holy Land is influenced by contemporary researches into the languages of that region, most notably the search for the original and perfect language spoken before the episode at Babel. As the confusion of tongues at Babel functions etiologically to account for the origin of all ideological conflict, it was thought that the rediscovery of the prima lingua might resolve all conflict.
    [Show full text]
  • SOLAR PONS 6Th August 1984 SOCIETY of LONDON
    THE SHERLOCK HOLMES SOCIETY OF LONDON: GRAPEVINE THE 22, Wisteria Lodge, Lupin Drive, Chelmsford, Essex. SOLAR PONS 6th August 1984 SOCIETY OF LONDON A11 books this time, unless something else turns up before I've finished typing this. The industrious Mr Kelvin I. Jones has sent me a list of his currently available Sherlockian monographs. In short supply are the following: The Carfax Syndrome, being a study of vampirism in the canon (Magico Magazine 1984), 18 pages, red card covers, A5 size, price £££1,00 including postage & packing; Upon the Tracing of Footsteps, by Sherlock Holmes edited by Kelvin I. Jones (Magico 1983; the title page says "London 1878"), 9 pages, green card covers, A5 size, price ££££££1.75 including postage and packing; Thank You. Watson - the Matches (Kelvin Jones 1981), 40 pages, yellow card covers, A5 size, 75 pence including postage and packing. This last brochure, the first thorough guide to the smoking habits of Sherlock Holmes, is in very short supply indeed. Forthcoming are; A Study in Streetnames , a biographical investigation into the origins of Canonical names, especially in TWIS (this -will be a new edition of a monograph published by Mr Jones a couple of years ago); Sherlock and Porlock, a study in the literary influences of the Holmes stories , a hardcover book of approximately 60 pages on quality paper with an introduction by Edward D. Hoch, due out in October 1984 in a 500 copy edition; Sherlock Holmes and the Criminologists , the background to STUD and the formative influences. If you are interested in these books, please write to Mr Jones at 18 Ross Street, Rochester, Kent ME1 2DF, and he will forward information about the forthcoming items when it is available.
    [Show full text]
  • Acotaciones Y Sus Variaciones En Titulares De Prensa Económica Inglesa: Un Análisis Cognitivo
    UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID FACULTAD DE FILOLOGÍA DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOLOGÍA INGLESA I TESIS DOCTORAL Acotaciones y sus variaciones en titulares de prensa económica inglesa: un análisis cognitivo MEMORIA PARA OPTAR AL GRADO DE DOCTORA PRESENTADA POR María Piedad Fernández Arias DIRECTOR Michael C. White Hayes Madrid, 2016 © María Piedad Fernández Arias, 2015 UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID FACULTAD DE FILOLOGÍA Departamento de Filología Inglesa I ACOTACIONES Y SUS VARIACIONES EN TITULARES DE PRENSA ECONÓMICA INGLESA: UN ANÁLISIS COGNITIVO Tesis doctoral M. Piedad Fernández Arias Director: Dr. Michael C. White Hayes Madrid, 2015 Acotaciones y sus variaciones en titulares de prensa económica inglesa: un análisis cognitivo Quotations and their variation patterns in business and politics English press headlines: A cognitive analysis Doctoral thesis M. Piedad Fernández Arias ([email protected]) Instructor: Dr. Michael C. White Hayes Madrid, 2015 2 Contents page List of Figures and Tables ........................................................................ 6 Acknowledgements ..................................................................................... 7 I) Abstract ……………………..………………..............…...…….. 8 Resumen ....................................................................................... 13 II) Introduction .................. ................................................................ 19 1. Scope of the study ..................................................... .............. 20 2. The concept of ‘intertextuality’
    [Show full text]
  • William of Ockham
    Handout 25 William of Ockham (1280–1349) 1. Life • also spelled Occam • born in central England, died in Munich • Franciscan, nominalist, and ”doctor invincibilis” • William of Baskerville in U. Eco's The Name of the Rose • He received his bachelor's degree at Oxford, and his mas- ter's at Paris, where he taught from a date between 1315 and 1320. • The question of poverty which so deeply agitated his order determined the later course of his life. • Their common ground of opposition to the pope drew the extreme Franciscans together with the Emperor Louis the Bavarian, the opponent of John XXII. • In December, 1323, he was summoned with some others to appear before the pope at Avignon, and was imprisoned there for over four years. He then escaped. • Ockham became one of the emperor's principal advisers and literary defenders. • The belief that John XXII was a heretic and no true pope, that the poverty of Christ and the apostles was an article of faith, were as much a part of his fixed belief as that the State and the rights of the emperor were independent of pope and Church. 2 William of Ockham • He taught that the Roman people have the right to elect their bishop (the pope). • According to him every people has the right to elect its leader, if it wishes to. • He went to Munich in Feb., 1330, where most of his political writings were composed. 2. Writings • Expositio aurea et admodum utilis super totam artem veterem • Quaestiones et decisiones in quatuor libros sententiarum • Centiloquium theologicum • Quodlibeta septem • De Sacramento altaris and De corpore Christi 3.
    [Show full text]
  • Download Download
    Book Reviews The Name of the Rose. UMBERTO ECO. Translated by William Weaver. San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. 502 p. ISBN 0-15-144647-4 $15.95. The Name of the Rose is a novel written on many levels. Set in a wealthy Italian abbey in the year 1327, it is, at its simplest, a fine blend of mystery and Gothic novel with a little sodomy and sex thrown in for good measure. On a mission from the Holy Roman Emperor to reach an accord with representatives of the Avignonese Pope, Franciscan Brother William of Baskerville arrives at the abbey to find the community in the grip of strange events which eventually lead to seven bizarre deaths and the destruction of the abbey. On another plane, the mystery itself serves as a way for Eco to indulge in his favourite topics: medieval philosophy, church history, and various skeins of heresy and corruption - all of which are probed with the detective techniques employed by William of Baskerville. Styling himself a moderate deconstructionist, the author builds his story on the questioning of texts. Eco has said: "There is not one immutable meaning or truth, intended or otherwise, but many. You have to extract all the implications or interpretations hidden within (a text)." (Vogue, April 1984, p. 393) Finally, the book exudes the author's leading passion, semiotics - the philosophical study of signs and symbols as linguistic portrayals of reality. Fine, but the patient reader may ask what makes this book merit review in a journal dedicated to archives and archival science? The major reason is that Eco focuses his philosophical questioning on the role of information and knowl- edge in a relatively primitive but rapidly changing society.
    [Show full text]
  • Name of the Rose
    NAME OF THE ROSE A PALIMPSEST OF UMBERTO ECO'S NOVEL (Transcript) ADSO (V.O.) Having reached the end of my poor sinner's life... my hair now white... I prepare to leave on this parchment my testimony as to the wondrous and terrible events I witnessed in my youth... towards the end of the year of Our Lord, 1327. May God grant me the wisdom and grace to be the faithful chronicler of the happenings that took place in a remote abbey in the dark north of Italy: an abbey whose name it seems even now pious and prudent to omit. (William and Adso arrive at the abbey) ADSO (V.O.): May my hand not tremble now that I start to relive the past and revive the feelings of uneasiness that oppressed my heart as we entered the battlements. INT. ABBOT: Should we tell him? MALACHIA: No. He will look in the wrong places. ABBOT: But... what if he should learn it of his own accord? MALACHIA: You overestimate his talents, my lord abbot. There's only one authority capable of investigating such matters. ... The holy Inquisition. ABBOT: What is your opinion, Venerable Jorge? Jorge: Dear brethren, I leave such worldly matters to younger men. WILLIAM: Adso? Adso: Yes, master. WILLIAM: In order to command nature one must first learn to obey it. Hmm? So, return to the forecourt, get the edificium on your left... enter the quadrangle on you right, you'll find the place you need. Behind the third arch. Adso: But you told me you'd never been to this abbey.
    [Show full text]
  • The Name of the Rose: VIEWING GUIDE
    The Name of the Rose - A Study Guide - Daren Blanck The Name of the Rose, a 1980 novel by Umberto Eco, is a murder mystery set in an Italian monastery in the year 1327 during the papacy of Pope John XXII. The book was also made into a film in 1986, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Sean Connery as the intrepid Franciscan monk, William of Baskerville. Along with his apprentice Adso of Melk (played by Christian Slater), William journeys to an abbey where a murder has been committed. As the plot unfolds, several other people mysteriously die in a a sub-plot of censorship and fear of documents that might dilute the faith of the Christian world. William and Adso discover a labyrinthine library, the subversive power of laughter, and come face to face with the Medieval Inquisition. The central character, William of Baskerville, is loosely based on William of Ockham (1285-1349), who first put forward the principle known as "Ockham's Razor": that one should always accept as most-likely the simplest explanation that covers the facts. Baskerville is a nod to Sir Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, and his book The Hound of the Baskervilles. The narrator, an old librarian at the time of his telling, is William’s sidekick Adso of Melk. His name is among other things a pun on Simplicio a character in Galileo Galilei's Dialogue; Adso = ad Simplicio ("to Simplify") and a reference to the Stift Melk, a Benedictine Abbey in Austria founded in 1089. Eco’s monastery may have been based on Stift Melk which is perched on a rock high above the city of Melk on the River Danube.
    [Show full text]
  • Article “Dreaming the Middle Ages” from the Mid 1980S Eco Displays Ten Middle Ages
    ISBN: 978-87-7349-818-7 Papers published in relation to the NORLIT 2011 conference are made available under the CC license [by- nc-nd]. Find the terms of use at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/dk/legalcode. Papers, som er offentliggjort i forbindelse med NORLIT 2011 konferencen stilles til rådighed under CC- licens[by-nc-nd]. Læs mere på http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/, hvis du vil vide, hvordan du må gøre brug af de registrerede papers. Accessible online: http://ruconf.ruc.dk/index.php/norlit/norlit2011/schedConf/presentations The Echo of Eco in The Name of the Rose (1980) Leif Søndergaard, SDU All literature is written out of and into the society where it has its offspring, no matter how hermetic, autonomous and fantastic it claims to be. Novels may be located in the past or the future, in a fairy world or a utopian society. Under all circumstances they bear witness of the temporal ethnic, national, social, cultural etc. contexts they are written in, one way or the other. They always have relations to society, even though their relations may be very complex. In fiction the social reality and the historical events are always interpreted, transformed, construed etc. according to certain procedures of artistic and aesthetic kind, i.e. narrative, structural, symbolic, metaphoric, stylistic, and cognitive devices. This is abundantly the case in The Name of the Rose.1 Eco has several intentions built into his novel. He wants to challenge and revise the usual ideas of the Middle Ages as a cultural monolithic unity.
    [Show full text]
  • Yet, Another Pre-Darby Rapture Statement
    Scholars Crossing Article Archives Pre-Trib Research Center May 2009 Yet, Another Pre-Darby Rapture Statement Thomas D. Ice Liberty University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/pretrib_arch Recommended Citation Ice, Thomas D., "Yet, Another Pre-Darby Rapture Statement" (2009). Article Archives. 47. https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/pretrib_arch/47 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Pre-Trib Research Center at Scholars Crossing. It has been accepted for inclusion in Article Archives by an authorized administrator of Scholars Crossing. For more information, please contact [email protected]. YET, ANOTHER PRE-DARBY RAPTURE STATEMENT by Thomas Ice In the eight years that I have been working as Executive Director of the Pre-Trib Research Center, there have been three major discoveries of writings teaching some form of a pretribulational rapture. The most recent find has been brought forth from an unexpected source that I will reveal to you in this article. WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT? Since many non-pretribulationists often formulate a historical argument against those teaching the pre-trib rapture, it is important to know that some did teach a rapture before the tribulation and distinct from the second coming. Rapture critic Gary DeMar says, “All attempts to find a pretrib Rapture any earlier than around 1830 do not stand up to historical scrutiny.”1 Of course, J. N. Darby himself first discovered pretribulationism from his own biblical studies during December 1826 and January 1827.2 But there are those who preceded Darby, as I have written about in the past.
    [Show full text]
  • The Name of the Rose
    THE NAME OF THE ROSE As William of Baskerville explained to his Watson, Adso: "For in every crime committed to possess an object, the nature of the object should give us an idea, however faint, of the nature of the assassin. (p. 285)" You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to realize that there was "something afoot" at that monastery in 1327. It cost the lives of Adelmo, Venantius, Berengar, Severinus, Malachi, and Abo. What was going on? What was everyone so upset about? Why were these monks murdered? In any murder or murder mystery, you need to get to the key that unlocks the mystery: motive. I might be helpful with getting to the motive in The Name of the Rose. Because I once lived a monastic life, as a member of the Franciscan Order, I have loved this book since its publication in the US back in the 80's. And I used it as a resource in my undergraduate Honors Thesis in history, which was about how people in the middle ages understood their world. How they thought that everything around them resembled the perfection of heaven, and how physical things were actually signs that pointed upward. This was particularly the case in the subject of the thesis: ALCHEMY. So, I'll tap into all that experience for the discussion today. This will help us explore how people who lived in 1327 understood their world, and what they valued so much they were willing to commit murder for it. So, we must ask ourselves William's question: "When we consider a book, we musn't ask ourselves what it says, but what it means...
    [Show full text]
  • Influence of Joachim in the 13Th Century
    THE INFLUENCE OF JOACHIM IN THE 13TH CENTURY Frances Andrews The end of the 12th century was one of the periods of great eschatological potential in the medieval Latin west. In October 1187 Jerusalem was lost to a Kurdish sultan, Saladin, and the Crusade campaigns which followed were catastrophic. Tensions between the English and French crowns were at a peak, and in June 1190 the western Emperor, Frederick I Barbarossa, drowned in the river Göksu (Saleph) on his way to the Holy Land. Things were no better in the Iberian peninsula: in July 1195 the Almohad Muslim prince Ya ‘qub I al-Mansur (the victorious) defeated the Christian King Alfonso VIII of Castille at the Battle of Alarcos. It was against this unstable background that Joachim, in the preface to his Liber de Concordia, wrote of his self-chosen role in preparing the Church in the face of the enemy:1 Our [task] is to foresee wars, yours is to hasten to arms. It is for us to go up to the watchtower on the mountain and, having seen the enemy, to give warning; yours, having heard the signal, is to take refuge in safer places. We, although unworthy scouts, witnessed long ago that the said wars would come. Would that you were worthy soldiers of Christ! “Let 1 For a chronology of his works as then known, see Kurt-Victor Selge, “L’origine delle opere di Gioacchino da Fiore,” in L’attesa della fine dei tempi nel medioevo, eds. Ovidio Capitani and Jürgen Miethke (Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico Quaderno, 28) (Bologna, 1990), pp.
    [Show full text]
  • Meta Narratives in Umberto Eco's the Name of the Rose
    [VOLUME 5 I ISSUE 4 I OCT. – DEC. 2018] e ISSN 2348 –1269, Print ISSN 2349-5138 http://ijrar.com/ Cosmos Impact Factor 4.236 Meta narratives in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose Dr. M. Sagaya Sophia* & Maria Ponn Sindhuja. P** *Assistant Professor, PG & Research Department of English, Government Arts College For Women (Autonomous) Pudukkottai – 622 001 **Ph. D Scholar (English), PG And Research Department of English, Government Arts And Science College For Women, Pudukottai – 622001 Received: July 20, 2018 Accepted: August 28, 2018 Meta narrative is a term developed by Jean- Francois Lyotard. It is “a theory that tries to give a totalizing, comprehensive account to various historical events, experiences, social, cultural phenomena based upon the appeal to universal truth or universal values” (Lyotard). Eco believes this type of meta narrative description and it is clearly portrayed in his novels. Umberto Eco, an Italian novelist, literary critic, philosopher, semiotician, and professor, is best known for his 1980 novel Il nome della rosa. It was translated into English in the name The Name of the Rose. The novel is a historical mystery. The novel is rich in Biblical allusions, medieval history, semiotics and literary theory. In simple words the novel could be defined as a well constructed labyrinth. The novel is a meta narrative fiction. It brings in many stories to support the main story line. The novel begins with the narrator giving an introduction to the story. This could be taken as the first phase through which one enters the novel. Next, the novel goes into how Adso writes the manuscript.
    [Show full text]