ABSTRACT
By 1980, at the age of 47, Umberto Eco had established an international scholarly reputation for his work in semiotics–the theory of signs and signifiers–with such books as Opera Aperta and The Role of the Reader. In that year the Italian edition of Eco’s famous novel, The Name of the Rose appeared under the imprint of Bompiani, the publishers of his scholarly work. Eco has been a constant popularizer, it can be categorically stated that he has reached a wider audience and in many ways–when one includes the positive response of medievalists and historians–a more responsive one through The Name of the Rose than his structuralist semiotics could do. The conventional enshrining and codification of cultural fact or artifact for him are systems generated by simple allegory and leading to tyranny, and the sort of rigid theocentric dogma that The Name of the Rose is dedicated to breaking.
