Umberto Eco’s book, a treatise on the nature of knowledge, has been transformed by Twentieth Century Fox into a simple melodrama, or a melodrama for the simple. The entanglement of a novice, Adso of Melk, and an innocent peasant girl forced to exchange sexual favors for leftovers from the kitchen of a Fourteenth Century monastery, forms the backbone of the motion picture. Not surprisingly, the last paragraph of Adso’s memoirs, set onto parchment in his nineties, acquires an entirely new meaning. His lament that the only thing that remains firm in his grasp are names, mere names, is transformed into a complaint that he did not even know the name of the girl he had dreamt of all his life. Among so many liberties taken by Twentieth Century Fox it is precisely this one that irritates a careful reader most. The mystery of knowledge is transformed in one fell swoop into the mystery of carnal knowledge, minus the girl’s name.