When William of Baskerville arrives at the abbey in The Name of the Rose, Abbo of Fossanova, the abbot, receives him with courtesy and a problem. A young monk, Adelmo of Otranto, has been found dead at the foot of the walls, and the abbot wants William, who has a reputation as a shrewd former inquisitor, to find out what happened. He sets conditions. The investigation must be discreet and finished before the papal delegation arrives, so that the abbey’s enemies cannot use it. And William may not enter the library: its labyrinth, its rules and its secrets are reserved for the librarian and his assistant, as they have been for generations. Abbo is a proud, worldly man, attached to the abbey’s wealth and prestige; he shows William its jewels with pleasure and tells him how, as a young monk at Fossanova, he helped carry the body of Thomas Aquinas. As the deaths multiply, he resists the investigation more than he supports it. When William is close to the truth, the abbot thanks him and tells him to leave the next morning: he will deal with the matter himself. That night he goes to the hidden room of the library through a secret passage. Jorge of Burgos breaks the mechanism, and the abbot suffocates in the wall.
// The theoryPlaces have managers
Environmental criminology has shown that crime concentrates not only in neighborhoods but in specific places, and that the decisive factor is often how they are run. John Eck and Ronald Clarke, with Rob Guerette, called the facilities that concentrate disproportionate harm risky facilities, and Eck and Tamara Madensen developed the idea of place management: the owners and managers of a place make decisions about its physical organization, its access, its rules and its resources that can prevent or enable harm. In closed institutions—prisons, boarding schools, residential homes, religious communities—the manager has unusual power over the people inside and over the information that leaves. When such managers prioritise the reputation of the institution, the harm inside is not only allowed to continue; it is protected from the outside world.
The risky facilities principle (Eck, Clarke and Guerette, 2007)
A small proportion of any group of similar facilities will account for the majority of crime experienced by the entire group.
Three management decisions
Abbo’s management of the crisis comes down to three decisions, and each one makes the harm worse. Restricting access: the library, where the motive and the weapon are, is closed to the investigator. Controlling information: the investigation must be discreet, and nothing must reach the papal delegation or the inquisitor. Preferring internal resolution: when the truth approaches, the outsider is sent away and the abbot decides to handle it himself. All three are classic features of institutions protecting their reputation, and all three serve the murderer. Jorge’s power rests on the library’s secrecy, which the abbot defends; his crimes continue during the days in which the abbot limits the investigation; and the abbot’s private attempt to resolve the matter delivers him into Jorge’s hands. The facility is risky not because of its walls, but because of how it is run.
// The subjectA manager, not a monster
Abbo is not evil. He is vain, political and attached to his position, and he believes, with some reason, that a scandal could destroy his abbey: the Pope’s envoys and the inquisitor are arriving, and a series of mysterious deaths among monks would be a gift to anyone who wanted to accuse the community of heresy or witchcraft. His priority is the institution, and he sees the investigation as a risk to be managed rather than a truth to be found. He also does not fully control his own abbey: the library has been run for decades by a faction around Jorge, and the abbot’s authority stops at its door. His death is the novel’s verdict on that kind of leadership. The man who wanted to keep the secret inside the walls dies inside them.
Abbot Abbo
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// The crackManagement explains the scale, not the murderer
The risky facilities approach explains why harm continues and spreads in a place, not why someone chooses to kill. The murders in the abbey are Jorge’s, and the abbot’s responsibility is of another kind: failure to protect, preference for silence, defense of a closed system. The theory is also built on quantitative patterns—many incidents in a few places—and an abbey with a handful of deaths in a week is an illustration rather than a case in the strict sense. And it should be said that Abbo did call in an investigator; his fault is not doing nothing, but setting limits that protected the wrong thing.
There is also a temptation to read too much of the present into the novel. Eco wrote a medieval mystery, not a report on institutional abuse. But the pattern he describes—a closed religious institution, a leader who protects its reputation, secrets that only a few control and an outside investigator who is welcomed and then dismissed—is one that real inquiries in several countries have documented in very different contexts. Abbo chose to limit the investigation and to keep the library closed while monks were dying. What the theory adds is that the safety of people inside an institution cannot depend on the priorities of the person who runs it.
Who investigates the institution
Public inquiries into abuse in religious institutions, care homes, boarding schools and sports organizations have repeatedly found that the harm was known to someone inside, and that leaders preferred internal solutions to external ones in order to protect the institution’s name. Their recommendations converge on a few principles: independent investigation, mandatory reporting to outside authorities, transparency and the removal of decisions about safety from those whose first loyalty is to the institution. Abbo’s request—find the culprit, but quietly and without opening the library—is exactly the kind of instruction those principles were designed to prevent.
Three key ideas
- Risky facilities and place management (Eck, Clarke and Guerette, 2007; Madensen and Eck) show that harm concentrates where managers’ decisions about access, rules and information allow it; in closed institutions the manager also controls what reaches the outside.
- Abbot Abbo asks William to investigate the deaths discreetly, without entering the library and before the papal delegation arrives; when William gets close, he dismisses him and goes to deal with it himself. Jorge traps him in a secret passage, where he suffocates.
- The crack: management explains the scale and the silence, not the murderer, and Abbo did call in an investigator. Even so, he chose to protect the abbey’s secrets while monks were dying.
Sources · further reading
- Eck, J. E., Clarke, R. V. and Guerette, R. T. (2007). “Risky Facilities: Crime Concentration in Homogeneous Sets of Establishments and Facilities”. Crime Prevention Studies, 21, 225-264.
- Madensen, T. D. and Eck, J. E. (2013). “Crime Places and Place Management”. In F. T. Cullen and P. Wilcox (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Criminological Theory. Oxford University Press.
- Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Anchor Books.
- Eco, U. (1980). Il nome della rosa. Bompiani.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Abad Abbone?
Abad Abbone (“Abbone de Fossanova”) is a villain from The Name of the Rose, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. He asked him to find the culprit, but not to ask questions about the library.
Why does Abbot Abbo (Abbo of Fossanova) become a villain?
Abbot Abbo and risky facilities: in The Name of the Rose, the head of the abbey asks William of Baskerville to investigate the deaths, but discreetly, before the papal delegation arrives, without touching the library and without scandal. Environmental criminology knows that harm concentrates in places whose managers tolerate or conceal it. Abbo managed the most closed place in Christendom.
Which criminological theory explains Abad Abbone?
Abad Abbone's case is analysed through Criminogenic facilities. The theory of risky facilities (Eck, Clarke) and of place management (Madensen and Eck) holds that crime concentrates in certain places because of how they are managed: who controls access, which rules are enforced, what is watched and what is kept quiet. Closed institutions are the extreme case, because their manager also controls information. Abbo, the abbot of The Name of the Rose (1980), kills nobody. But he runs an abbey whose library is a labyrinth of secrets, he protects its reputation above all, and he asks for an investigation that does not reach the bottom. He dies trapped in a passage of his own abbey, by the very secrets he wanted to keep.
