.
The Name of the Rose is full of logical mappings, semiotic systems like the encoded map of the library and the purported plan of the murder sequence, but also of correspondingly arbitrary sign systems like numerology, iconography, mathematics and measurement, cryptography, and language itself, or better yet multiple languages, including the spoken word, the language of gems, of flowers, of the landscape, and of gesture. The fundamental tension in the novel is between those, like the inquisitor Bernardo Gui, Jorge de Burgos, Ubertino of Casale, or Adso in old age and that rare medieval-postmodern William who has abandoned his role of inquisitor, refusing to discriminate between martyr and heretic, for example. .
Or using Adso's description, between those who cognitively map their worlds according to "very rigid structures, in which representation is minimally responsive to the operational environment and maximally specified by the selective values of the cognizer" and those who cognitively map their world according to a "very flexible" structure "in which representation is maximally responsive to the environment and minimally specified by the selective values of the cognizer" (Eco, 1983).
The readers, too, must navigate between flexibility and rigidity in mapping the postmodern upon the medieval in The Name of the Rose. Discussing the "mannerist," or hierarchical, labyrinth that he constructs in his novel, Eco in his "Postscript" says the following about the far more complex understanding of space that William and the readers glimpse at the end of the story: .
An abstract model of conjecturality is the labyrinth. But there are .
three kinds of labyrinth. One is the Greek, the labyrinth of .
Theseus. This kind does not allow anyone to get lost: you go in, .
arrive at the center, and then from the center you reach the exit. .
[.] Then there is the mannerist maze: if you unravel it, you find .