07. Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco (1932) is an Italian freemason, medievalist, philosopher and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose and his many essays.

Eco employs his education as a medievalist in his novel The Name of the Rose, which was made into a movie starring Sean Connery as a monk who investigates a series of murders revolving around a monastery library. He is particularly good at translating medieval religious controversies and heresies into modern political and economic terms so that the reader can understand them without being a theologian. At the conclusion of that novel, we are left with a monk attempting to reconstruct a library based on scraps and attempting to create meaning by the combination of random pieces of information. This monk is fulfilling the role of a reader.

Since 1985, Umberto Eco has been awarded over thirty honorary doctorates from various academic institutions worldwide such as the universities of Paris (Sorbonne Nouvelle) (1989), Buenos Aires (1994), Santa Clara (1996), Moscow (1998), Berlin (FUB) (1998), Quebec (UQAM) (2000), Jerusalem (2002) and Siena (2002).