Framing the Text-Image Relationship(s) in Henry Suso’s Exemplar

At the end of his life, the Dominican monk and mystical writer Henry Suso (c. 1295-1366) put together the Exemplar, the famous compilation of his German works carried out with the help of his spiritual daughter, Elsbeth Stagel. This work is exceptional in many respects: first, Suso develops a complex reflection on the place of images in spiritual experience, as well as on the role of images in mystical discourse (notably their capacity to express the ineffable nature of God). This image theory relies on a rich vocabulary based on the term "bild" and its derivatives (entbilden, überbilden, bildgebend, bildlos, bildrich…), but also on a key phrase ("Daz man bild mit bilden ûs tribe…"). Second, the most striking aspect of the Exemplar lies without doubt in the presence of actual drawings in six of the fourteen manuscripts as well as in the two early printed versions. Although we cannot claim with certainty that Suso designed this iconographical programme himself, there are strong arguments suggesting that it may well be the case. As Jeffrey Hamburger has demonstrated, the Exemplar shows a complex pattern of imitation/model where not only the text, but also the images, help the reader to imitate Suso in his quest to spiritual perfection. These drawings (or engravings in the case of the printed copies) make the compilation a unique witness to the complex relationship between texts and images in the field of late-medieval spiritual literature. The way the main text, the images and the inscriptions inserted within the images interact with each other certainly shows that the pictures are more than simple illustrations. On the contrary, they add another level of interpretation to the text. They work with it in order to produce meaning and to involve the reader in a mystical transformation by serving as instruments of mystical knowledge. In this paper, I focus on the theoretical concepts of ‘frame’ and ‘framing’ (as they are used in visual and literary studies, notably by Werner Wolf) as a paradigm for studying the complex text-image relationship which is at play in the Exemplar. Indeed, these concepts appear function as a cognitive tool that allows us to reconsider the (inter-)dependence of text and images in this work. The term ‘frame’ is widespread and used in many disciplines and for different media, implying a variety of meanings and, occasionally, leading to vagueness in the definition of the term. All approaches nevertheless share one common point, namely the interpretive function imparted to frames: they guide and make the interpretation possible; they can even control it. By making use of these concepts, I aimed to offer a rethinking of the complex relationship between text and images in this work and thus reach a renewed understanding of the active role played by the images in the interpretative process implied by the reading of this work, as well as the dynamic and continuous exchange between its visual and textual contents. The aim of this paper is thus to show to what extent “framing” is a useful concept for analysing the complex intermedial construction of Henry Suso’s Exemplar. We will see that some textual elements of the Exemplar give a framework for the interpretation of the images, while images also frame and structure the reading of the text, indicating that Suso conceived of images as instruments of mystical knowledge. The images of the Exemplar can thus be considered as a visual discourse on mystical experience.