The Name of the Rose, first published in Italian in 1980 and in English in 1983, was both a critical and popular success, staying at the top of the bestseller lists for weeks, and eventually selling more than a million copies in hard cover and more in paper back. The novel has remained in print for more than two decades, and continues to generate a large body of critical commentary. While academic interest might have been predicted, given Eco's reputation as a scholar, the popular response to the book took all by surprise. Who could have imagined that a long, complicated, multi-layered novel, set in the fourteenth century and with long passages of untranslated Latin, German, and French would appeal to the world-wide reading public?

Contemporary reviews find a variety of reasons for its appeal. Masolino D'Amico, in a review for the Times Literary Supplement, for example, says...