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This essay shows Eco at his best: learned and ironic, but sympathetic to his subject and never descending into sarcasm, which is sometimes his weakness. He throws in his lot with a string of patristic, medieval, and early modern literati, both Christian and Jewish, in a collaborative attempt to determine what language Adam spoke in the Garden before the Fall, and what that means for theories of human linguistics.

Eco is not only the chronicler of past intellectual controversies, but a theorist in his own right: unraveling Dante's idiosyncratic poetic ambitions and his linguistic theory as he suggests that the poet's final statement on language (its relationship to reality, its origin and universality and subjection to convention) actually grew out of an admittedly unproven encounter with 14th century cabala.

Along the way Eco showers us with his characteristic joy in the unexpected and coincidental, recounting the unresolved exegetical question as to whether or in what order Adam named the fish (undersea creatures being difficult to parade through the Garden, even for God) -- the curious fact that Dante considered Eve the first being to utter real human speech (a discomfiting notion for our medieval poet) -- that the first to conceive of Chomsky's "black box" were actually a group of 14th century grammarians and radical Aristotelians -- and the activities of a group of Jewish intellectuals in a 13th century Italy, some of whom gave public readings on the Comedia, transliterated it into Hebrew for their fellow Jews, and even traveled to Rome with the intention of converting the Pope.

In Eco's hands the middle ages are always a wild and woolly place, but here his affinity for Italian poetry and the world of Dante flings him far above the dark wood of conspiracies and hoaxes and the tangle of minds which he indulges so much in his historical fiction. That a longing for communion with prelapsarian Adam can strip the cynicism from such a knowing man is one of the delights of this chapter.