The Simple People

The Simple People—the unlettered peasantry, the urban poor, the landless laborers, the lepers, the outcasts—form the vast, silent majority of the medieval world in The Name of the Rose. They are the excluded, the voiceless, the ones who do not speak Latin and cannot write their own names. William of Baskerville, in his long conversations with Adso, develops a radical thesis about their role in history: heresy does not begin with doctrine but with the condition of being simple and excluded. The simple are not drawn to heresy because they understand theological subtleties; they are drawn to it because it offers hope, a promise of a different life, a banner under which to shout their despair. "Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper," William tells Adso, meaning that the material reality of exclusion—hunger, disease, powerlessness—is the true root of every movement that the church condemns as heterodox.

The Simple as the Raw Material of Heresy

William explains to Adso that the simple cannot choose their personal heresy; they cling to whatever preacher passes through their village. The great river of Christian society, once contained within strong banks, has become a delta, its branches mingling and confusing Catharists with Waldensians, Arnoldists with Fraticelli, Dolcinians with Beghards. The simple, who have no subtlety of doctrine, flow from one branch to another, carrying the hopes and resentments of one movement into the next. When a reformer gathers companions on a mountaintop to live in poverty, the crowd that joins him comes not only for his message but because they have heard stories of other reformers and believe this is that. The powerful exploit this confusion: inquisitors attribute to one group the errors of another, and if the sectarians of one movement commit a crime, that crime is attributed to every sectarian of every movement. The simple are meat for slaughter, used when they are useful in causing trouble for the opposing power and sacrificed when they are no longer of use.

The Leper as the Sign of Exclusion

William uses the figure of the leper as the paradigmatic sign of exclusion. The lepers, with their decaying flesh and twittering voices, are the others, those who remain on the fringe of the flock. The flock hates them, and they hate the flock. Saint Francis understood this: his first decision was to go and live among the lepers, not merely to help them but to signify something—that the people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body. But Francis did not succeed. To recover the outcasts he had to act within the church, to obtain the recognition of his rule, from which an order would emerge, and this order, as it emerged, recomposed the image of a circle at whose margin the outcasts remain. So now there are bands of Fraticelli and Joachimites who again gather the outcasts around themselves, but they too are branded as heretics, whatever their doctrine.

The Simple as Victims of Power

The simple are caught between two fires. On one side, the church and the secular lords need them to remain excluded in order to maintain the existing order. On the other side, the movements that promise them liberation are themselves manipulated by the powerful. The Emperor Louis uses the Franciscan call to poverty as a weapon against the Pope; the Pope uses the Inquisition to crush both heretics and imperial sympathizers. The simple, who join a heretical group because they want a better world, find themselves fighting battles they do not understand, dying for causes that serve the ambitions of princes and prelates. William tells Adso that the cellarer Remigio, who was with Fra Dolcino on Monte Rebello, was not moved by ideas but by a "feast of fools, a magnificent carnival"—a sense of freedom that had nothing to do with theology. And when the carnival ended, Remigio became a glutton and a coward, betraying his former comrades to save his own skin. The simple, William concludes, have little choice: "Betray or rebel: we simple folk have little choice."

The Simple and the Truth of the Individual

Despite his bleak analysis, William does not dismiss the simple as merely ignorant or dangerous. He tells Adso that Roger Bacon believed the poor, the outcast, the idiots and illiterate often speak with the mouth of our Lord. The simple have a sense of the individual, a grasp of concrete truth that learned doctors, lost in their search for broad general laws, often miss. But this sense, by itself, is not enough. The simple grasp a truth of their own, perhaps truer than that of the doctors of the church, but then they destroy it in unthinking actions. The task of the learned, as Bacon conceived it, is to coordinate the elementary needs and disordered expectations of the simple through a new natural science, a new natural magic that would transform the world without destroying it. But this enterprise, William admits, has failed. The truth of the simple has been transformed into the truth of the powerful, more useful for the Emperor Louis than for a Friar of the Poor Life.

The Simple and the End of the Abbey

In the final catastrophe, the simple people of the abbey—the servants, the swineherds, the cooks, the peasants from the valley—are the first to flee, the first to be trampled, the first to be forgotten. The girl whom Adso loved, a poor peasant who sold her body for an ox heart, is arrested as a witch and will be burned. Salvatore, the grotesque Babel-speaker who has wandered through every heretical movement of the age, is handed over to the Inquisition. The cellarer Remigio, who once believed in Dolcino's dream of justice, confesses to murders he did not commit rather than face torture. The simple pay for everything, even for those who speak in their favor, even for those like Ubertino and Michael who, with their words of penance, drove the simple to rebel. William tells Adso that one day the big dogs, the Pope and the Emperor, will make peace over the corpses of the smaller dogs who bit one another in their service. And Michael or Ubertino will be treated as the girl is treated today. The simple are the fuel on which the fire of history burns, and when the fire is over, only their ashes remain.