Mystical theory and emblematic practice in Sandaeus's works

This paper will confront the uses of figurative thinking in emblematic literature and in mystical literature. This confrontation allows for defining a process of fi gurability, the latter being understood as the potentiality of the appearance of either the image within language or language within the image, following Louis Marin’s definition. In order to carry out this study, we will analyze on the one hand the vocabulary related to the field of Figura within the proper emblematic corpus of the Bibliotheca Imaginis Figuratae, which was done thanks to the Mandat d’impulsion scientifique of the FNRS (2008–10). On the other hand, we will study the interactions between this corpus and a group of mystical texts from the early seventeenth century. We mean to find the conditions under which the mystical experience is cast in the rhetorical shape of symbolic language