Bernard Gui

Bernard Gui was a Dominican friar, inquisitor and bishop active in southern France during the early fourteenth century. He wrote an influential inquisitorial manual and became associated with the machinery of medieval religious investigation and ecclesiastical authority.

In Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, the arrival of the inquisitor Bernard Gui turns the search for evidence into a struggle over authority, interpretation and whether laughter, books and knowledge can be treated as threats to religious order.