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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

[X-posted Mediev-L and Medieval Religion]

Umberto Eco has published another scholarly mystery, or romp
through the quicksand, _Baudolino_ (trans. by William Weaver;
London and New York).  All or most of the TLS review (of
10/11/02) is online at
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/this_week/story.asp?story_id=21625  Tom
Shippey, the reviewer, says the novel demands an
"extraordinarily high level of knowledge and sophistication,"
more than _Name of the Rose_, but has already become a
bestseller in Germany.  .

A paragraph from toward the end of the review may suffice to
give a flavor of the book:

"One thing which Eco does pointedly and continually is to remind
us all of the time when Europe, for all its dissensions and
competing dialects, was an international community, united in
Catholic Christendom, scholastic method and Latin learning. Even
the Letter of Prester John, while drawing heavily on Otto von
Freising, gets its first mention from Alberic de
Trois-Fontaines, and is strongly supported by Ralph of
Coggeshall - a German, a Frenchman, an Englishman, and the
latter a mentor of William of Baskerville to boot. Eco
furthermore projects strong sympathy for scholasticism itself,
traditionally seen since Francis Bacon as monkish and
"vermiculate" learning, but seen by Eco, and by William de
Baskerville, an admirer of Roger Bacon, as scientific method in
embryo. It is true that all the speculations of Baudolino and
his friends are in the end dismissed and destroyed by
Paphnutius, the blinded Byzantine secretary, as far beyond
Baudolino as a detective as Mycroft Holmes is beyond Sherlock;
true also that Eco's Western world is one of continual warfare
and competition. But the former deficiency could be seen as a
charming ingenuousness, the latter as healthy rivalry. The roots
of power in Eco's world are in the Latino-German West, not in
the subtle but decadent or fantastic East."

Al Magary

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