Trent

Trent, a city in the northern Italian region of Trentino, appears in the narrative as the place where the heresiarch Fra Dolcino launched his public ministry. It was there, according to the account given by Ubertino of Casale to Adso of Melk, that Dolcino—a priest's bastard educated in letters but already a thief—resumed the preaching of the earlier heretic Gherardo Segarelli. In Trent, Dolcino declared himself the only true apostle of God, proclaimed that everything should be held in common in love, and taught that it was licit to lie indiscriminately with all women, so that no one could be accused of concubinage. It was also in Trent that Dolcino seduced—or was seduced by—a very beautiful maiden of noble family named Margaret, whom Ubertino, echoing a long tradition, compared to Héloïse seducing Abelard, insisting that it is through woman that the Devil penetrates men's hearts. The Bishop of Trent, alarmed by the growing disorder, drove Dolcino from the diocese, but by then the heresiarch had already gathered more than a thousand followers. This expulsion did not end the movement; rather, it set Dolcino on a long march back to the Novara region where he was born, gathering other deluded folk along the way, including Waldensian heretics who lived in the mountains he passed through. The events at Trent thus constitute the crucial first stage of the Dolcinian rebellion, a rebellion whose memory—and whose surviving letters—later entangled the cellarer Remigio of Varagine and his companion Salvatore, and ultimately provided Bernard Gui with the evidence to condemn them as heretics and murderers. The city's name recurs in the narrative as a point of origin for the violent, apocalyptic heresy that the abbey's blind librarian Jorge of Burgos so feared, a heresy that, in Jorge's view, threatened to unleash the very forces of chaos that the library was built to contain.