English Faculty Book Gallery
Postscript to the Middle Ages: Teaching Medieval Studies through Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose
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Description
More than a quarter century after its publication in English, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose remains a popular novel among medievalists and non-medievalists alike. Its riveting account of a series of murders at a wealthy Italian abbey during the papacy of John XXII, amidst the tensions of the Franciscan Spiritualist controversy, serves as an excellent point of entry to the cultural, philosophical, and theological milieu of fourteenth-century Europe. This collection of essays approaches the novel as a primary text in medieval studies courses and seeks to provide ways of integrating it into such courses effectively.
Part One of the collection consists of essays addressing the pedagogical advantages and pitfalls of teaching The Name of the Rose in a variety of medieval courses, including literature, cultural studies, history, religious studies, art history, and manuscript studies. Serving as a bridge between the explicitly pedagogical essays that precede it and the critical essays that follow, Part Two of the volume explores the relationship between Eco’s novel and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 1986 film version. The volume concludes with a selection of scholarly essays dealing with major medieval historical figures, movements, and cultural phenomena as they pertain to the novel, including fourteenth-century apocalyptic traditions, reflections on medieval language and sign theories, and the search for Aristotle’s lost second book of Poetics.
While each essay in the collection stresses its own disciplinary contexts and concerns, together they enrich each other, providing a valuable addition to the relatively small canon of texts on medieval pedagogy.
ISBN
978-0-8156-3234-4
Publication Date
2009
Publisher
Syracuse University Press
Disciplines
Medieval Studies | Nonfiction
Recommended Citation
(Ganze) Langdon, Alison, "Postscript to the Middle Ages: Teaching Medieval Studies through Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose" (2009). English Faculty Book Gallery. 12.
https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/english_book/12
Comments
Alison (Ganze) Langdon is Associate Professor of English at Western Kentucky University. She is the editor of Postscript to the Middle Ages: Teaching Medieval Studies through Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (2009) and has published articles on the intersection of ethics and gender in Chaucer and on the trobairitz. Her current research focuses on the dog as liminal human in medieval literature. She serves as a member of the Executive Council of the Medieval Association of the Midwest and is co-editor of the Association’s journal, Enarratio.