Malachi allows Adso and William to visit the scriptorium but explains that only the librarian is permitted to enter the labyrinthine library.

Adso and William also meet other monks: Remigio of Varagine, the cellarer Salvatore of Montferrat, a monk who speaks an odd combination of several different languages Severinus of Sankt Wendel, the herbalist Malachi of Hildesheim, the librarian Berengar of Arundel, his assistant Venantius of Salvemec, a translator Benno of Uppsala, a rhetorician Jorge of Burgos, a blind monk and many others.

While Adso admires the beauty of the abbey, William debates with Ubertino of Casale, a Franciscan monk who has fled the order because of political persecution. Ado asks William to discreetly investigate before the envoys arrive, and William agrees. The abbot, Ado of Fossanova, tells William about a strange and mysterious event: a monk named Adelmo of Otranto, who worked as an illuminator in the scriptorium, recently fell to his death from the tallest tower of the abbey. William reveals his powerful skills of deduction when he locates a runaway horse on the scant evidence of prints in the snow. On the first day, William and Adso visit an unnamed abbey somewhere in northern Italy, where William plans to attend a theological disputation on the contentious problems of whether Christ had been poor and whether the pope or the Holy Roman Emperor should hold political authority in Europe. The action then shifts to the late 1320s, when Adso was a novice of about eighteen years old, traveling Italy in the service of William of Baskerville, an English Franciscan and former inquisitor. The second prologue introduces us to Adso of Melk, a Benedictine monk who is writing this manuscript at the end of his life. He explains that the manuscript is divided into seven days, and each day into eight sections corresponding to the times of the day at which the monks prayed (matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, nones, vespers, and compline). Although the narrator expresses doubts about the authenticity of the text and the veracity of the incredible story it tells, he has decided nonetheless to translate and publish it in Italian. The Name of the Rose begins with a prologue by an unknown narrator, who explains how he found a transcription of a medieval manuscript containing the account of Adso of Melk, a fourteenth-century German monk.

The name of the rose pages