Framing the Text-Image Relationship in Henry Suso’s Exemplar
At the end of his life, the Dominican monk and mystical author Henry Suso (ca. 1295-1366) begun the Exemplar, a compilation of his German works made with the help of his spiritual daughter, Elsbeth Stagel. Besides the fact that Suso offers in this book a complex discourse on the role of images in mystical experience, the most striking aspect of the Exemplar lies in the fact that in many manuscripts (and in the two early printed versions as well), the texts of the compilation are accompanied by drawings or engravings. More than simple illustrations of the text, these images add another level of interpretation. They work together with the text in order to produce meaning. In this paper, I will focus on the theoretical concept of frame (as it is used in art history and literary studies) as a paradigm destined to study the complex text-image relationship that is found in the Exemplar. Indeed, the frame appears as a cognitive tool that allows us to rethink the (inter-)dependence of text and images in this work.