Discovery of Venantius's Body

On the morning of the second day, during the office of lauds, the monks of the abbey were interrupted by terrified swineherds who had found a corpse protruding from the great jar of pigs' blood behind the choir. The body, when extracted and washed, revealed the face of Venantius of Salvemec, the Greek scholar and translator with whom William and Adso had spoken the previous afternoon in the scriptorium. The discovery shattered the fragile calm that had followed Adelmo of Otranto's death and forced William to confront the possibility that a murderer was at work within the abbey walls.

Discovery and Immediate Reaction

The body was found at dawn, thrust head-down into the vessel of blood that had been set aside after the previous day's pig slaughter. The blood, properly stirred and left in the cold, had not clotted but had begun to solidify around the corpse, soaking the habit and making the face unrecognizable until a servant threw water over it and wiped the features clean. The abbot, Abo, immediately approached William and beseeched him to act quickly, acknowledging that something was afoot in the abbey that demanded all his wisdom. William noted that Venantius's stall had been empty during the office and asked whether Berengar of Arundel had been present; the abbot confirmed that Berengar was in his place, but William dismissed this as inconclusive, observing that the corpse could have been placed there hours earlier, while everyone was asleep.

William's Examination and Deductions

William bent over the corpse with the practiced detachment of a former inquisitor. He cleansed Venantius's face further and, with Severinus of Sankt Wendel's assistance, examined the body for wounds. Severinus noted that the features were not swollen as they would be in a drowned man, confirming that Venantius was already dead when someone threw him into the jar. No wounds or bruises were found on the head, and Severinus reported that no signs of any particular poison were visible on the corpse, though many poisons leave no trace. William then turned his attention to the ground around the jar. The snow, which he called an admirable parchment on which men's bodies leave very legible writing, had been badly scraped by the crowd of monks and servants. However, Adso discovered a set of human footprints between the jar and the Aedificium, deeper than those left by the morning's commotion and accompanied by a continuous trail as of something dragged. The spoor led from the jar to the door of the refectory, on the side of the Aedificium between the south tower and the east tower. William concluded that Venantius had died in the Aedificium, most probably in the library, and that the murderer had carried the body down to conceal it, both to avoid attention being concentrated on the library and to ensure the corpse would be discovered.

The Poison and the Blackened Fingers

Later, during the examination of Berengar's corpse on the fourth day, Severinus recalled that Venantius's right hand had two fingertips darkened, as if blackened by some dark substance. Berengar's fingers showed the same marks, with a trace also on the third finger. Severinus, who had initially thought Venantius had handled inks, now recognized the pattern. William hypothesized that both men had touched the same poisonous substance, which had also blackened their tongues. Severinus then remembered a highly powerful poison that had been stolen from his laboratory years earlier, a slimy yellowish substance that killed within half an hour if it came into contact with the lips. The poison had been given to him by a traveling brother, and he had kept it hidden until a storm, during which his laboratory was devastated and the ampoule went missing. William deduced that the poison had been used to coat the pages of the forbidden book, so that anyone who read it avidly, moistening his fingers to turn the pages, would ingest the poison and die.

The Murderer's Method and Motive

William's final reconstruction, revealed during the confrontation in the finis Africae, established that Jorge of Burgos had spread the poison on the pages of Aristotle's second book of the Poetics. Venantius, who had stolen the book from the finis Africae, read it eagerly and felt ill, then ran to the kitchen for help, where he died. Berengar of Arundel, who had discovered Venantius's body, moved it to the jar of blood to conceal his own role in revealing the library's secrets, then took the book himself and later died from the same poison while reading it in the infirmary. The murder of Venantius was thus not a single act of violence but the first link in a chain of deaths caused by Jorge's determination to protect the book from being read.

Consequences and Significance

Venantius's death marked the point at which the abbey's crisis escalated from a single suspected suicide to a series of murders. It forced William to abandon his initial theory that Adelmo had killed himself and to focus on the library as the locus of the crimes. The discovery of the blackened fingers and the stolen poison led William to the forbidden book and, ultimately, to Jorge. The event also deepened the abbot's anxiety about the impending meeting between the imperial and papal legations, as he feared that the crimes would compromise the abbey's neutrality and give Bernard Gui a pretext for intervention. Venantius's death, like those that followed, was a direct consequence of the library's secret and the murderous lengths to which Jorge would go to preserve it.