the ox heart
The ox heart is a raw, bloody piece of offal that the peasant girl brings to the abbey kitchen as payment for a sexual encounter with the cellarer, Remigio of Varagine. It becomes a crucial piece of evidence when Adso of Melk discovers it abandoned in the kitchen after his own encounter with the girl, leading William of Baskerville to deduce the identity of her usual client and to uncover the network of nocturnal transactions between the monks and the village women.
Identity and Materiality
The ox heart is a large, freshly slaughtered organ, described as "among clots of blood and scraps of flabbier and whitish meat" with "dead but still throbbing with the gelatinous life of dead viscera, lined by livid nerves." It is a visceral, material object that embodies the abbey's daily cycle of slaughter and consumption. The heart is not a symbolic or literary artifact but a piece of offal, a byproduct of the pigs slaughtered for the monks' table. Its raw, bloody presence in the kitchen marks it as a thing of the body, of hunger and exchange, rather than of the intellect or the spirit.
Role in the Narrative
The ox heart first appears as the object the peasant girl carries in a bundle when she is discovered in the kitchen by Adso. She abandons it when she flees, and Adso, terrified, finds it and mistakes it for evidence of another murder. William of Baskerville immediately identifies it: "What man could have such a big heart? It's the heart of a cow, or an ox; they slaughtered an animal today, in fact." This moment transforms the heart from a source of horror into a clue. William uses it to reconstruct the girl's transaction: she gave herself to the cellarer not for love but for food, and the ox heart was her payment. The heart thus becomes the material trace of a system of barter in which the girl's body is exchanged for sustenance.
Connections and Consequences
The ox heart is directly linked to the cellarer, Remigio of Varagine. William deduces that the man who arranged the girl's visit must have access to the kitchen and a sense of economy, giving her offal rather than a choice cut. This points to Remigio, who controls the abbey's food supplies. The heart also connects to Salvatore, who procures girls for the cellarer and who later tells Adso about a magic spell involving a black cat and eggs, a scheme that leads to his and the girl's arrest by Bernard Gui. The heart, then, is not an isolated object but a node in a network of hunger, desire, and exploitation that runs beneath the abbey's pious surface.
Thematic Significance
The ox heart embodies the novel's concern with the material realities that underlie spiritual and intellectual pursuits. It is a thing of the body, of hunger and sex, that stands in stark contrast to the abstract debates about poverty and the pursuit of forbidden knowledge. The heart is also a symbol of the girl's plight: she is a "poor hungry creature" who must barter her body for food. William's interpretation of the heart—as a sign of economic necessity rather than moral depravity—reflects his own compassionate, materialist understanding of human behavior. The heart, in its raw, bloody materiality, serves as a reminder that the abbey's lofty ideals are built on a foundation of physical labor, animal slaughter, and the exploitation of the poor.
