From Freddie de Boer’s intro to his new online book club on The Name of the Rose:
There are other major events to consider in relation to the date of the book— pre-Columbus, it reflects a smaller known world; pre-Elizabethan, it represents a period before the English became one of the dominant practical and intellectual powers of Europe; pre-Copernican, it contains a world still largely in keeping with the classical tradition of knowledge emanating from the ancient Greeks. Yet there is a point of context that is to me of crucial importance, but which I have never read a commentator on the text mention: the story is pre-Cartesian, predating by 300 years “cogito ergo sum.”
Descartes’s great move, in the broad perspective, was to simplify. The real revolution in Meditations on First Philosophy and the Discourse was to effect a sweeping away, to clean the slate and start at the very foundations of knowledge. Why? Because the intricacy of medieval philosophy and theology had become unwieldy to the point of absurdity. One could be forgiven for assuming that medieval philosophy was unsophisticated, but in fact it was anything but. Medieval philosophy and theology were teeming with complexity. A vast array of philosophers, thinkers, and clergymen worked tirelessly, following the threads of knowledge that had been spooled out by the ancient Greeks, St. Thomas Aquinas, the Gnostics, Cicero and Lucretius, the Byzantines, Boethius, the apostle Peter. This complexity, and its tendency to devolve into absurd minutia, has often made it the subject of ridicule; see, for example, the notorious question of angels dancing on the head of a pin. Yet while Eco has some gentle fun with his characters and their intellectual foibles, he also demonstrates respect for their logical sophistication and their dedication to finding answers to the most persistent and great of human questions. This, too, is one of the book’s virtues— in its consideration of the breadth and depth of medieval knowledge, and in the recognition of the voracious appetite of the thinkers of the Middle Ages for scholarship (including, incidentally, the great Middle Eastern and Muslim intellectual traditions), ITNOTR undermines the centuries-old distortion in the idea of the “Dark Ages.” (An idea, actually, roughly contemporary with the time period of the novel.)
(Source: theroseinwinter.com)
