SOURCE: A review of The Search for the Perfect Language, in American Historical Review, Vol. 102, No. 3, June, 1997, p. 776.

In the following review, Breisach outlines the thesis of The Search for the Perfect Language.

This volume [The Search for the Perfect Language] is part of a series created by five European publishers of different nationalities to foster understanding of the European past and perhaps to facilitate the evolution of a united Europe. Umberto Eco had to be cognizant of the intent of the series in his narration of the search for a perfect language (a language that mirrored without distortions the true nature of objects). He excludes, plausibly, any pre-and extra-European searches. Eco locates the intersection between the search for a perfect language and the emergence of a European identity in the eleventh century, when the awareness of multitudinous vernacular idioms had grown strong enough to become a stimulus...