The Second Book of Aristotle's Poetics

The Second Book of Aristotle's Poetics is the lost, legendary treatise on comedy that forms the central object of desire and destruction in Umberto Eco's novel. Hidden for decades in the abbey's secret chamber, the Finis Africae, this single surviving Greek manuscript on linen paper is the book for which monks kill and die, and which the blind librarian Jorge of Burgos finally devours and consigns to fire, believing that its doctrine of laughter would destroy Christian civilization.

Identity and Provenance

The book is a composite volume, bound together with three other texts: an Arabic manuscript on the sayings of a fool, a Syriac translation of an Egyptian alchemical treatise, and a Latin commentary on the Coena Cypriani. The Greek portion, written on fragile linen paper (charta lintea) manufactured at Silos near Burgos, is the only surviving copy of Aristotle's second book of the Poetics, devoted entirely to comedy. Jorge of Burgos, as a young monk, discovered the manuscript during a mission to collect Apocalypse manuscripts in León and Castile. He stole it, brought it back to the abbey, and hid it in the Finis Africae, the most inaccessible room of the library, where it remained untouched for forty years. The catalogue entry for the volume lists it as "Liber acephalus de stupris virginum et meretricum amoribus" — a headless book about the deflowering of virgins and the loves of whores — a deliberately misleading description that conceals its true nature.

The Doctrine of Laughter

The surviving opening lines, which William of Baskerville translates aloud in the Finis Africae, reveal Aristotle's argument that comedy, like tragedy, produces a catharsis — but of the passion of the ridiculous rather than of pity and fear. The text defines the means by which comedy excites laughter: through actions that liken the best to the worst, through deceit, the impossible, violation of natural laws, debasement of characters, and vulgar pantomime; and through speech that relies on misunderstandings of similar words, garrulity, repetition, puns, diminutives, errors of pronunciation, and barbarisms. The book treats laughter not as a base, plebeian release but as an art, an object of philosophy, and a legitimate instrument for arriving at truth. It argues that the ridiculous, by showing things differently from how they are, can make the observer say: "Ah, this is just how things are, and I didn't know it."

Jorge's Campaign of Suppression

Jorge of Burgos, who had ruled the abbey's intellectual life for decades through the compliant librarians he installed, recognized the book's danger the moment he read it. He believed that if this text were to become known, laughter would be elevated from a carnivalesque safety valve for the simple into a weapon of the learned — a tool for dismantling all authority, including the fear of God. He took a lethal poison from Severinus's infirmary and smeared it between the pages of the Greek manuscript, so that anyone who read it avidly, moistening his fingers to turn the stuck pages, would ingest the poison and die. Venantius of Salvemec, who stole the book and read it first, died in the kitchen. Berengar of Arundel, who took it next, died in the balneary. Malachi of Hildesheim, who retrieved it and read it in the Finis Africae, died in the choir during matins, his fingers blackened and his tongue dark, gasping that it had "the power of a thousand scorpions." Jorge himself, when confronted by William, tore the remaining pages from the book and devoured them, then threw the burning volume into a fire that consumed the entire library.

Thematic Significance

The Second Book of Aristotle's Poetics functions in the novel as the ultimate symbol of forbidden knowledge — not because it is heretical in content, but because its doctrine threatens the very structure of authority that the medieval church depends on. Jorge's final speech makes this explicit: if laughter becomes a philosophical instrument, then the rhetoric of conviction can be replaced by the rhetoric of mockery, and every holy and venerable image can be dismantled. The book represents the possibility of a world where truth is approached through doubt and play rather than through fear and dogma. William of Baskerville, who reconstructs the book's argument from fragments and from other texts, sees in it the promise of a more humane learning — one that frees humanity from the "insane passion for the truth" that drives men like Jorge to murder. The destruction of the book, and of the library that housed it, marks the end of an era: the greatest library in Christendom reduced to ashes, and with it the hope that knowledge could be preserved without being controlled.