Coena Cypriani manuscript
The Coena Cypriani manuscript is a medieval parody of Scripture that appears in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose as a key object of contention, a forbidden text whose existence and interpretation become entangled with the novel's central conflict over laughter, heresy, and the control of knowledge. It is a comic, often grotesque rewriting of biblical episodes in which every figure from Adam to Christ is made to perform absurd actions, and it serves as a dangerous precedent for the lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics, which Jorge of Burgos fears will legitimize laughter as a philosophical tool.
Nature and Content of the Manuscript
The Coena Cypriani is a work of the ioca monachorum tradition, a paschal-season parody that was widely circulated in medieval monasteries despite being banned or execrated by austere novice masters. It retells the entire Bible as a single, chaotic banquet: Adam settles himself in the center, Eve lies down on a leaf, Cain enters dragging a plow, Abel comes with a pail to milk Brunellus, Noah makes a triumphal entry rowing the ark, and Jesus gaily pours vinegar over all the dishes from a sponge taken from a spear. The text systematically inverts every sacred narrative, turning the Last Supper into a gluttonous feast where the apostles divide up a calf and Jesus devours a donkey. A verse version had been written for Pope John VIII with the inscription "I loved to jest; accept me, dear Pope John, in my jesting. And, if you wish, you can also laugh," and Charles the Bald himself had staged it as a comic sacred mystery. The work was known to be a parody of Scripture, a sacrilegious rewriting that some considered indecent and others defended as a secret moral lesson hidden behind a veil of mirth.
Role in the Library and the Conflict
The Coena Cypriani manuscript was bound together with three other texts in a single volume: an Arabic manuscript on the sayings of a fool, a Syriac translation of an Egyptian alchemical work, and the Greek copy of Aristotle's second book of the Poetics. This composite volume was catalogued in the library under the entry "Expositio Magistri Alcofribae de coena beati Cypriani Cartaginensis Episcopi" and was housed in the finis Africae, the most secret and inaccessible part of the labyrinth. The abbot had forbidden anyone to read it, and when Venantius of Salvemec mentioned the Coena during a scriptorium debate on laughter, Malachi of Hildesheim became furious, reminding the monks of the prohibition. The manuscript thus became a gateway to the far more dangerous Aristotelian text, and its presence in the forbidden zone marked it as a work that the library's guardians considered a book of falsehood, a monstrous parody that could corrupt the minds of the learned.
Connection to the Debate on Laughter
The Coena Cypriani manuscript was directly implicated in the scriptorium debate that preceded the first murder. During that discussion, Venantius of Salvemec cited the Coena as an example of how witty riddles and comic inversions could reveal truth, while Jorge of Burgos condemned it as an ignoble work that distorted the sacred. The debate turned on whether laughter could be a vehicle of truth, and the Coena served as a concrete instance of the kind of comic literature that Jorge feared. When Adso of Melk later dreamed the entire Coena Cypriani, inserting into it the people and events of the abbey's recent tragedies, William of Baskerville recognized the dream as a reenactment of the parody and used it to confirm his hypothesis about the forbidden book. The Coena, in its carnivalesque inversion of all order, became a mirror of the chaos that had overtaken the abbey, and its presence in the finis Africae alongside Aristotle's Poetics revealed the chain of reasoning that linked the murders to the suppression of laughter as a philosophical concept.
Significance and Thematic Weight
The Coena Cypriani manuscript functions in the novel as a synecdoche for the entire tradition of medieval comic literature that Jorge of Burgos sought to suppress. It is a work that, in Jorge's view, could teach learned men the "clever and, from that moment, illustrious artifices that could legitimatize the reversal" of the divine order. The Coena's method of turning Scripture into a feast of fools was precisely the kind of parody that Jorge feared would, if combined with Aristotle's philosophical justification of laughter, destroy the fear of God that underpinned ecclesiastical authority. The manuscript thus stands at the intersection of the novel's central themes: the conflict between orthodoxy and heresy, the power of books to shape thought, and the question of whether laughter is a liberating force or a diabolical weapon. Its presence in the library, bound together with the lost Aristotelian text, makes it both a clue and a symbol, a fragment of the larger intellectual heritage that the abbey was built to preserve but also to bury.
