AFTER NONES
In which there is a visit to the scriptorium, and a meeting with many scholars, copyists, and rubricators, as well as an old blind man who is expecting the Antichrist.

As we climbed up I saw my master observing the windows that gave light to the stairway. I was probably becoming as clever as he, because I immediately noticed that their position would make it difficult for a person to reach them. On the other hand, the windows of the refectory (the only ones on the ground floor that overlooked the cliff face) did not seem easily reached, either, since below them there was no furniture of any kind.
When we reached the top of the stairs, we went through the east tower into the scriptorium, and there I could not suppress a cry of wonder. This floor was not divided in two like the one below, and therefore it appeared to my eyes in all its spacious immensity. The ceilings, curved and not too high (lower than in a church, but still higher than in any chapter house I ever saw), supported by sturdy pillars, enclosed a space suffused with the most beautiful light, because three enormous windows opened on each of the longer sides, whereas a smaller window pierced each of the five external sides of each tower; eight high, narrow windows, finally, allowed light to enter from the octagonal central well.
The abundance of windows meant that the great room was cheered by a constant diffused light, even on a winter afternoon. The panes were not colored like church windows, and the lead-framed squares of clear glass allowed the light to enter in the purest possible fashion, not modulated by human art, and thus to serve its purpose, which was to illuminate the work of read?ing and writing. I have seen at other times and in other places many scriptoria, but none where there shone so luminously, in the outpouring, of physical light which made the room glow, the spiritual principle that light incarnates, radiance, source of all beauty and learning, inseparable attribute of that proportion the room embodied. For three things concur in creating beauty: first of all integrity or perfection, and for this reason we consider ugly all incomplete things; then proper proportion or consonance; and finally clarity and light, and in fact we call beautiful those things of definite color. And since the sight of the beautiful implies peace, and since our appetite is calmed similarly by peacefulness, by the good, and by the beautiful, I felt myself filled with a great consolation and I thought how pleasant it must be to work in that place.
As it appeared to my eyes, at that afternoon hour, it seemed to me a joyous workshop of learning. I saw later at St. Gall a scriptorium of similar proportions, also separated from the library (in other convents the monks worked in the same place where the books were kept), but not so beautifully arranged as this one. Antiquarians, librarians, rubricators, and scholars were seated, each at his own desk, and there was a desk under each of the windows. And since there were forty windows (a number truly perfect, derived from the decupling of the quadragon, as if the Ten Command?ments had been multiplied by the four cardinal virtues), forty monks could work at the same time, though at that moment there were perhaps thirty. Severinus explained to us that monks working in the scriptorium were exempted from the offices of terce, sext, and nones so they would not have to leave their work during the hours of daylight, and they stopped their activity only at sunset, for vespers.
The brightest places were reserved for the antiquarians, the most expert illuminators, the rubricators, and the copyists. Each desk had everything required for illumi?nating and copying: inkhorns, fine quills which some monks were sharpening with a thin knife, pumice stone for smoothing the parchment, rulers for drawing the lines that the writing would follow. Next to each scribe, or at the top of the sloping desk, there was a lectern, on which the codex to be copied was placed, the page covered by a sheet with a cut-out window which framed the line being copied at that moment. And some had inks of gold and various colors. Other monks were simply reading books, and they wrote down their anno?tations in their personal notebooks or on tablets.
I did not have time, however, to observe their work, because the librarian came to us. We already knew he was Malachi of Hildesheim. His face was trying to assume an expression of welcome, but I could not help shuddering at the sight of such a singular countenance. He was tall and extremely thin, with large and awkward limbs. As he took his great strides, cloaked in the black habit of the order, there was something upsetting about his appearance. The hood, which was still raised since he had come in from outside, cast a shadow on the pallor of his face and gave a certain suffering quality to his large melancholy eyes. In his physiognomy there were what seemed traces of many passions which his will had disciplined but which seemed to have frozen those features they had now ceased to animate. Sadness and severity predominated in the lines of his face, and his eyes were so intense that with one glance they could penetrate the heart of the person speaking to him, and read the secret thoughts, so it was difficult to tolerate their inquiry and one was not tempted to meet them a second time.
The librarian introduced us to many of the monks who were working at that moment. Of each, Malachi also told us what task he was performing, and I ad?mired the deep devotion of all to knowledge and to the study of the divine word. Thus I met Venantius of Salvemec, translator from the Greek and the Arabic, devoted to that Aristotle who surely was the wisest of all men. Benno of Uppsala, a young Scandinavian monk who was studying rhetoric. Aymaro of Alessandria, who had been copying works on loan to the library for a few months only, and then a group of illuminators from various countries, Patrick of Clonmacnois, Rabano of Toledo, Magnus of Iona, Waldo of Hereford.
The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis. But I must come to the subject of our discussion, from which emerged many useful indica?tions as to the nature of the subtle uneasiness among the monks, and some concerns, not expressed, that still weighed on all our conversations.
My master began speaking with Malachi, praising the beauty and the industry of the scriptorium and asking him for information about the procedure for the work done there, because, he said very acutely, he had heard this library spoken of everywhere and would like to examine many of the books. Malachi explained to him what the abbot had already said: the monk asked the librarian for the work he wished to consult and the librarian then went to fetch it from the library above, if the request was justified and devout. William asked how he could find out the names of the books kept in the cases upstairs, and Malachi showed him, fixed by a little gold chain to his own desk, a voluminous codex covered with very thickly written lists.
William slipped his hands inside his habit, at the point where it billowed over his chest to make a kind of sack, and he drew from it an object that I had already seen in his hands, and on his face, in the course of our journey. It was a forked pin,. so constructed that it could stay on a man’s nose (or at least on his, so prominent and aquiline) as a rider remains astride his horse or as a bird clings to its perch. And, one on either side of the fork, before the eyes, there were two ovals of metal, which held two almonds of glass, thick as the bottom of a tumbler. William preferred to read with these before his eyes, and he said they made his vision better than what nature had endowed him with or than his advanced age, especially as the daylight failed, would permit. They did not serve him to see from a distance, for then his eyes were, on the contrary, quite sharp, but to see close up. With these lenses he could read manuscripts penned in very faint letters, which even I had some trouble deciphering. He explained to me that, when a man had passed the middle point of his life, even if his sight had always been excellent, the eye hardened and the pupil became recalcitrant, so that many learned men had virtually died, as far as reading and writing were concerned, after their fiftieth summer. A grave misfortune for men who could have given the best fruits of their intellect for many more years. So the Lord was to be praised since someone had devised and constructed this instrument. And he told me this in support of the ideas of his Roger Bacon, who had said that the aim of learning was also to prolong human life.
The other monks looked at William with great curiosi?ty but did not dare ask him questions. And I noticed that, even in a place so zealously and proudly dedicated to reading and writing, that wondrous instrument had not yet arrived. I felt proud to be at the side of a man who had something with which to dumbfound other men famous in the world for their wisdom.
With those objects on his eyes William bent over the lists inscribed in the codex. I looked, too, and we found titles of books we had never before heard of, and others most famous, that the library possessed.
“De pentagono Salomonis, Ars loquendi et intellige?di in lingua hebraica, De rebus metallicis by Roger of Hereford, Algebra by Al-Kuwarizmi, translated into Latin by Robertus Anglicus, the Punica of Silius Italicus, the Gesta francorum, De laudibus sanctae crucis by Rabanus Maurus, and Flavii Claudii Giordani de aetate mundi et hominis reservatis singulis litteris per singulos libros ab A usque ad Z,” my master read. “Splendid works. But in what order are they listed?” He quoted from a text I did not know but which was certainly familiar to Malachi: “ ‘The librarian must have a list of all books, carefully ordered by subjects and authors, and they must be classified on the shelves with numerical indications.’ How do you know the colloca?tion of each book?”
Malachi showed him some annotations beside each title. I read: “iii, IV gradus, V in prima graecorum”; “ii, V gradus, VII in tertia anglorum,” and so on. I under?stood that the first number indicated the position of the book on the shelf or gradus, which was in turn indicated by the second number, while the case was indicated by the third number; and I understood also that the other phrases designated a room or a corridor of the library, and I made bold to ask further informa?tion about these last distinctions. Malachi looked at me sternly: “Perhaps you do not know, or have forgotten, that only the librarian is allowed access to the library. It is therefore right and sufficient that only the librarian know how to decipher these things.”
“But in what order are the books recorded in this list?” William asked. “Not by subject, it seems to me.” He did not suggest an order by author, following the same sequence as the letters of the alphabet, for this is a system I have seen adopted only in recent years, and at that time it was rarely used.
“The library dates back to the earliest times,” Malachi said, “and the books are registered in order of their acquisition, donation, or entrance within our walls.”
“They are difficult to find, then,” William observed.
“It is enough for the librarian to know them by heart and know when each book came here. As for the other monks, they can rely on his memory.” He spoke as if discussing someone other than himself, and I realized he was speaking of the office that at that moment he unworthily held, but which had been held by a hun?dred others, now deceased, who had handed down their knowledge from one to the other.
“I understand,” William said. “If I were then to seek something, not knowing what, on the pentagon of Solomon, you would be able to tell me that there exists the book whose title I have just read, and you could identify its location on the floor above.”
“If you really had to learn something about the pentagon of Solomon,” Malachi said. “But before giv?ing you that book, I would prefer to ask the abbot’s advice.”
“I have been told that one of your best illuminators died recently,” William said then. “The abbot has spok?en to me a great deal of his art. Could I see the codices he was illuminating?”
“Because of his youth, Adelmo of Otranto,” Malachi said, looking at William suspiciously, “worked only on marginalia. He had a very lively imagination and from known things he was able to compose unknown and surprising things, as one might join a human body to an equine neck. His books are over there. Nobody has yet touched his desk.”
We approached what had been Adelmo’s working place, where the pages of a richly illuminated psalter still lay. They were folios of the finest vellum—that queen among parchments—and the last was still fixed to the desk. Just scraped with pumice stone and softened with chalk, it had been smoothed with the plane, and, from the tiny holes made on the sides with a fine stylus, all the lines that were to have guided the artist’s hand had been traced. The first half had’ already been cov?ered with writing, and the monk had begun to sketch the illustrations in the margins. The other pages, on the contrary, were already finished, and as we looked at them, neither I nor William could suppress a cry of wonder. This was a psalter in whose margins was delin?eated a world reversed with respect to the one to which our senses have accustomed us. As if at the border of a discourse that is by definition the discourse of truth, there proceeded, closely linked to it, through wondrous allusions in aenigmate, a discourse of falsehood on a topsy-turvy universe, in which dogs flee before the hare, and deer hunt the lion. Little bird-feet heads,, animals with human hands on their back, hirsute pates from which feet sprout, zebra-striped dragons, quadru?peds with serpentine necks twisted in a thousand inex?tricable knots, monkeys with stags’ horns, sirens in the form of fowl with membranous wins, armless men with other human bodies emerging from their backs like humps, and figures with tooth-filled mouths on the belly, humans with horses’ heads, and horses with hu?man legs, fish with birds’ wings and birds with fishtails, monsters with single bodies and double heads or single heads and double bodies, cows with cocks’ tails and butterfly wings, women with heads scaly as a fish’s back, two-headed chimeras interlaced with dragonflies with lizard snouts, centaurs, dragons, elephants, manticores stretched out on tree branches, gryphons whose tails turned into an archer in battle array, diabolical crea?tures with endless necks, sequences of anthropomor?phic animals and zoomorphic dwarfs joined, sometimes on the same page, with scenes of rustic life in which you saw, depicted with such impressive vivacity that the figures seemed alive, all the life of the fields, plowmen, fruit gatherers, harvesters, spinning-women, sowers along?side foxes, and martens armed with crossbows who were scaling the walls of a towered city defended by monkeys. Here an initial letter, bent into an L, in the lower part generated a dragon; there a great V, which began the word “verba,” produced as a natural shoot from its trunk a serpent with a thousand coils, which in turn begot other serpents as leaves and clusters.
Next to the psalter there was, apparently finished only a short time before, an exquisite book of hours, so incredibly small that it would fit into the palm of the hand. The writing was tiny; the marginal illuminations, barely visible at first sight, demanded that the eye examine them closely to reveal all their beauty (and you asked yourself with what superhuman instrument the artist had drawn them to achieve such vivid effects in a space so reduced). The entire margins of the book were invaded by minuscule forms that generated one another, as if by natural expansion, from the terminal scrolls of the splendidly drawn letters: sea sirens, stags in flight, chimeras, armless human torsos that emerged like slugs from the very body of the verses. At one point, as if to continue the triple “Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus” repeat?ed on three different lines, you saw three ferocious figures with human heads, two of which were bent, one downward and one upward, to join in a kiss you would not have hesitated to call immodest if you were not persuaded that a profound, even if not evident, spiritu?al meaning must surely have justified that illustration at that point.
As I followed those pages I was torn between silent admiration and laughter, because the illustrations natu?rally inspired merriment, though they were commenting on holy pages. And Brother William examined them smiling and remarked, “Babewyn: so they are called in my islands.”
“Babouins: that is what they call them in Gaul,” Malachi said. “Adelmo learned his art in your country, although he studied also in France. Baboons, that is to say: monkeys from Africa. Figures of an inverted world, were houses stand on the tip of a steeple and the earth is above the sky.”
I recalled some verses I had heard in the vernacular of my country, and I could not refrain from repeating them:

Aller wunder si geswigen,
das erde himel hat überstigen,
daz sult ir vür ein wunder wigen

And Malachi continued, quoting from the same text:

Erd ob un himel unter,
das sult ir han besunder
vür aller wonder ein rounder.

“Good for you, Adso,” the librarian continued. “In fact, these images tell of that country where you arrive mounted on a blue goose, where hawks are found that catch fish in a stream, bears that pursue falcons in the sky, lobsters that fly with the doves, and three giants are caught in a trap and bitten by a cock.”
And a pale smile brightened his lips. Then the other monks, who had followed the conversation a bit shyly, laughed heartily, as if they had been awaiting the librarian’s consent. He frowned as the others continued laughing, praising the skill of poor Adelmo and pointing out to one another the more fantastic figures. And it was while all were still laughing that we heard, at our backs, a solemn and stern voice.
“Verba vana aut risui apta non loqui.”
We turned. The speaker was a monk bent under the weight of his years, an old man white as snow, not only his skin, but also his face and his pupils. I saw he was blind. The voice was still majestic and the limbs powerful, even if the body was withered by age. He stared at us as if he could see us, and always thereafter I saw him move and speak as if he still possessed the gift of sight. But the tone of his voice was that of one possessing only the gift of prophecy.
“The man whom you see, venerable in age and wisdom,” Malachi said to William, pointing out the newcomer, “is Jorge of Burgos. Older than anyone else living in the monastery save Alinardo of Grottaferrata, he is the one to whom many monks here confide the burden of their sins in the secret of confession.” Then, turning to the old man, he said, “The man standing before you is Brother William of Baskerville, our guest.”
“I hope my words did not anger you,” the old man said in a curt tone. “I heard persons laughing at laugh?able things and I reminded them of one of the princi?ples of our Rule. And as the psalmist says, if the monk must refrain from good speech because of his vow of silence, all the more reason why he should avoid bad speech. And as there is bad speech there are also bad images. And they are those that lie about the form of cre?ation and show the world as the opposite of what it should be, has always been, and always will be through?out the centuries until the end of time. But you come from another order, where I am told that merriment, even the most inopportune sort, is viewed with in?dulgence.” He was repeating what the Benedictines said about the eccentricities of Saint Francis of Assisi, and perhaps also the bizarre whims attributed to those friars and Spirituals of every kind who were the most re?cent and embarrassing offshoots of the Franciscan order. But William gave no sign of understanding the insinuation.
“Marginal images often provoke smiles, but to edify?ing ends,” he replied. ‘As in sermons, to touch the imagination of devout throngs it is necessary to intro?duce exempla, not infrequently jocular, so also the discourse of images must indulge in these trivia. For every virtue and for every sin there is an example drawn from bestiaries, and animals exemplify the hu?man world.”
“Ah, yes,” the old man said mockingly, but without smiling, “any image is good for inspiring virtue, provid?ed the masterpiece of creation, turned with his head down, becomes the subject of laughter. And so the word of God is illustrated by the ass playing a lyre, the owl plowing with a shield, oxen yoking themselves to the plow, rivers flowing upstream, the sea catching flue, the wolf turning hermit! Go hunting for hares with oxen, have owls teach you grammar, have dogs bite fleas, the one-eyed guard the dumb, and the dumb ask for bread, the ant give birth to a calf, roast chickens fly, cakes grow on rooftops, parrots hold rhetoric lessons, hens fertilize cocks, make the cart go before the oxen, the dog sleep in a bed, and all walk with their heads on the ground! What is the aim of this nonsense? A world that is the reverse and the opposite of that established by God, under the pretext of teaching divine precepts!”
“But as the Areopagite teaches,” William said humbly, “God can be named only through the most distorted things. And Hugh of St. Victor reminded us that the more the simile becomes dissimilar, the more the truth is revealed to us under the guise of horrible and indecorous figures, the less the imagination is sated in carnal enjoyment, and is thus obliged to perceive the mysteries hidden under the turpitude of the images. …”
“I know that line of reasoning! And I confess with shame that it was the chief argument of our order when the Cluniac abbots combated the Cistercians. But Saint Bernard was right: little by little the man who depicts monsters and portents of nature to reveal the things of God per speculum et in aenigmate, comes to enjoy the very nature of the monstrosities he creates and to delight in them, and as a result he no longer sees except through them. You have only to look, you who still have your sight, at the capitals of your cloister.” And he motioned with his hand beyond the window, toward the church. “Before the eyes of monks intent on meditation, what is the meaning of those ridiculous grotesques, those monstrous shapes and shapely mon?sters? Those sordid apes? Those lions, those centaurs, those half-human creatures, with mouths in their bellies, with single feet, ears like sails? Those spotted tigers, those fighting warriors, those hunters blowing their horns, and those many bodies with single heads and many heads with single bodies? Quadrupeds with serpents’ tails, and fish with quadrupeds’ faces, and here an animal who seems a horse in front and a ram behind, and there a horse with horns, and so on; by now it is more pleasurable for a monk to read marble than manuscript, and to admire the works of man than to meditate on the law of God. Shame! For the desire of your eyes and for your smiles!”
The old man stopped, out of breath. And I admired the vivid memory thanks to which, blind perhaps for many years, he could still recall the images whose wickedness he decried. I was led to suspect they had greatly seduced him when he had seen them, since he could yet describe them with such passion. But it has often happened that I have found the most seductive depictions of sin in the pages of those -very men of incorruptible virtue who condemned their spell and their effects. A sign that these men are impelled by such eagerness to bear witness to the truth that they do not hesitate, out of love of God, to confer on evil all the seductions in which it cloaks itself; thus the writers inform men better of the ways through which the Evil One enchants them. And, in fact, Jorge’s words filled me with a great desire to see the tigers and monkeys of the cloister, which I had not yet admired. But Jorge interrupted the flow of my thoughts because he re?sumed speaking, in a much calmer tone.
“Our Lord did not have to employ such foolish things to point out the strait and narrow path to us. Nothing in his parables arouses laughter, or fear. Adelmo, on the contrary, whose death you now mourn, took such pleasure in the monsters he painted that he lost sight of the ultimate things which they were to illustrate. And he followed all, I say all”—his voice became solemn and ominous—“the paths of monstrosity. Which God knows how to punish.”
A heavy silence fell. Venantius of Salvemec dared break it.
“Venerable Jorge,” he said, “your virtue makes you unjust. Two days before Adelmo died, you, were present at a learned debate right here in the scriptorium. Adelmo took care that his art, indulging in bizarre and fantastic images, was directed nevertheless to the glory of God, as an instrument of the knowledge of celestial things. Brother William mentioned just now the Areo?pagite, who spoke of learning through distortion. And Adelmo that day quoted another lofty authority, the doctor of Aquino, when he said that divine things should be expounded more properly in figures of vile bodies than of noble bodies. First because the human spirit is more easily freed from error; it is obvious, in fact, that certain properties cannot be attributed to divine things, and become uncertain if portrayed by noble corporeal things. In the second place because this humbler depiction is more suited to the knowledge that we have of God on this earth: He shows Himself here more in that which is not than in that which is, and therefore the similitudes of those things furthest from God lead us to a more exact notion of Him, for thus we know that He is above what we say and think. And in the third place because in this way the things of God are better hidden from unworthy persons. In other words, that day we were discussing the question of understanding how the truth can be revealed through surprising expressions, both shrewd and enigmatic. And I reminded him that in the work of the great Aristotle I had found very clear words on this score. …”
“I do not remember,” Jorge interrupted sharply, “I am very old. I do not remember. I may have been excessively severe. Now it is late, I must go.”
“It is strange you should not remember,” Venantius insisted; “it was a very learned and fine discussion, in which Benno and Berengar also took part. The question, in fact, was whether metaphors and puns and riddles, which also seem conceived by poets for sheer pleasure, do not lead us to speculate on things in a new and surprising way, and I said that this is also a virtue demanded of the wise man. ... And Malachi was also there. …”
“If the venerable Jorge does not remember, respect his age and the weariness of his mind ... otherwise always so lively,” one of the monks following the discus?sion said. The sentence was uttered in an agitated tone—at least at the beginning, because the speaker, once realizing that in urging respect for the old man he was actually calling attention to a weakness, had slowed the pace of his own interjection, ending almost in a whisper of apology. It was Berengar of Arundel who had spoken, the assistant librarian. He was a pale-faced young man, and, observing him, I remembered Ubertino’s description of Adelmo: his eyes seemed those of a lascivious woman. Made shy, for everyone was now looking at him, he held the fingers of both hands enlaced like one wishing to suppress an internal tension.
Venantius’s reaction was unusual. He gave Berengar a look that made him lower his eyes. “Very well, Brother,” he said, “if memory is a gift of God, then the ability to forget can also be good, and must be respected. I respect it in the elderly brother to whom I was speaking. But from you I expected a sharper recollection of the things that happened when we were here with a dear friend of yours. …”
I could not say whether Venantius underlined with his tone the word “dear.” The fact is that I sensed an embarrassment among those present. Each looked in a different direction, and no one looked at Berengar, who had blushed violently. Malachi promptly spoke up, with authority: “Come, Brother William,” he said, “I will show you other interesting books.”
The group dispersed. I saw Berengar give Venantius a look charged with animosity, and Venantius return the look, silent and defiant. Seeing that old Jorge was leaving, I was moved by a feeling of respectful reverence, and bowed to kiss his hand. The old man received the kiss, put his hand on my head, and asked who I was. When I told him my name, his face brightened.
“You bear a great and very beautiful name,” he said. “Do you know who Adso of Montier-en-Der was?” he asked. I did not know, I confess. So Jorge added, “He was the author of a great and awful book, the Libellus de Antichristo, in which he foresaw things that were to happen; but he was not sufficiently heeded.”
“The book was written before the millennium,” William said, “and those things did not come to pass. …”
“For those who lack eyes to see,” the blind man said. “The ways of the Antichrist are slow and tortuous. He arrives when we do not expect him: not because the calculation suggested by the apostle was mistaken, but because we have not learned the art.” Then he cried, in a very loud voice, his face turned toward the hall, making the ceiling of the scriptorium re-echo: “He is coming! Do not waste your last days laughing at little monsters with spotted skins and twisted tails! Do not squander the last seven days!”