I know that it's cool for scholarly types to bash the reliability of Wikipedia, but over the past two days it has won my heart by helping me comprehend to what extent the popes of the middle ages really were pulling the political and economic strings of Europe: everybody whose anybody links to all the other anybodies. It's like six degrees of Clement V.
Years ago I had scanned _The Key to the Name of the Rose_ but, last time I read NOTR, I couldn't find it on my computer, but I did manage to acquire a scanned etext from the Darknet. Unfortunately, hte entire middle section, which is a chronology failed to line up the dates with the actual people, places, and events which they were supposed to represent. Yesterday I finally got frustrated enough that I thought I would start reconstructing the chronology using Internet resources (yes, this is the sort of thing I do for fun). Much to my shock, _The Key_ left out a lot of the juicy details which really help to underscore why all the monks in NOTR are so paranoid.
_The Key_ is still a great resource for the Latin translations and a very superficial explanation of the connections, but I would definitely encourage readers who want to really dig into NOTR to use Wikipedia as a resource, also.
