Le Nom de la rose
No deluxe-paper copies were issued for the original version of this text.
One of the first 110 copies on vergé Rives paper (no. 65).
At the heart of a mysterious Benedictine abbey in northern Italy stands the keep housing “the greatest library in Christendom,” strictly closed to all but the Librarian. It is here that William of Baskerville chooses to arrange a meeting between the Franciscans and the partisans of the Avignon pope John XXII, whom the Emperor opposes in support of the Franciscans. But the external conflicts harbored by the abbey during this week at the end of November 1327 are compounded by an inner intrigue: a series of murders converge on the Labyrinth and the Library, and more precisely on a secret Book…
“The great achievement of The Name of the Rose is to show brilliantly how political debate (the Franciscan ideal of poverty; social evil and heresy) and theological debate (where authority lies, and the exact boundary between the worldly and the spiritual) intertwine in the urgency of practice” (Médiévales, no. 3, 1983).
A formidable novel, concerned with Aristotle, freedom, injustice and cyanide — awarded the Prix Médicis étranger in 1982.
A unique deluxe issue of this masterpiece, prefaced here by Eco, who explains the changes made to the text.