The use and function of imagery in Henry Suso’s Exemplar: a Reassessment

In his Exemplar (a compilation of his texts accompanied by drawings he probably designed) , Henry Suso offers a complex example of the relationship between text and image in the spiritual realm and a theory of devotional imagery based on a key phrase: “Drive out images with images”. This compilation also shows a complex pattern of imitation/model, well studied by Jeffrey Hamburger who demonstrated that not only the text, but also the images help the reader to imitate Suso in his quest to the spiritual perfection. In this paper, I propose to focus on the Exemplar’s images in order to give an answer to these questions: which pictorial strategies does Suso use to express his ideas? Are images a simple illustration of his discourse and a mean to bring his teaching within a larger audience’s reach by simplifying it? Or, on the contrary, are images entirely embedded to Suso’s discourse and do they make it denser?