One remarkable thing about The Name of the Rose is that the characters in it don't think and talk like modern people who happen to have been transported into the Middle Ages. They seem to think differently -- about what's possible, what people can expect from life, how you know things, what counts as an argument...

Possibly my favorite part:

"What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you. The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless. Er muoz gelîchesame die leiter abewerfen, sô er an ir ufgestigen . . . . Is that how you say it?"

"That is how it is said in my language. Who told you that?"

"A mystic from your land. He wrote it somewhere, I forget where. And it is not necessary for somebody one day to find that manuscript again. The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away."

The "mystic from your land" was Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said that in his Tractatus 591 years after that conversation was set, in modern rather than medieval German ("Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist") - "he must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up on it".