How to represent the invisible? Among those who have, throughout the ages, answered this question, the mystic has something special to say. He who has an experiential knowledge of the Other - the divinity, the depths of the soul - seeks languages to express what he has seen, felt, listened to during the experience that transforms his body and soul.
The experience passes through various modalities: vision, ecstasy, rapture. In all cases, God speaks beyond the Scriptures and the book of nature. He speaks in words without syllables or vowels and in words that can be seen, said Gregory the Great. He speaks in signs and visions. What he shows and makes hear during the mystical vision must then be translated. The subject seeks to recount what he experiences. The visionary narrative raises the question of the possibility and limits of translating inner images into words, of any linguistic objectification of the subject's subjectivity. It is not by chance that we find a number of verbal images in these narratives or that they become poems, canciones, Sometimes, yet another language emerges, this time pictorial - figures, drawings, paintings, frescoes that represents the mystical experience.
The pages of this collective volume propose to consider this relationships between mystical experience, language and image in order to decipher, through concrete examples from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth century, how authors and artists attempted to show the invisible through the verbal image of the narrative, the poetic image of the lyric, and the material image of drawing, painting and sculpture.

René Wetzel, *1959
1992 PhD University of Fribourg (Switzerland), with a thesis on the manuscript tradition of Gottfrieds of Strasbourg ‘Tristan’ ; 1986-1993 research associate at the Martin Bodmer Foundation, Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, Cologny-Geneva; 2000 Habilitation, thesis on the mural paintings at the Castelroncolo castle and the Vintler family of Bolzano; since 2001 full professor of German medieval language and literature at the University of Geneva; from 2003 to 2006 and from 2016 to 2021 director of the German language and literature Department. Research focuses: religious literature of the 14th/15th centuries; mysticism; mediality; text-image-relations; orality, visuality, literacy; historical semantics; edition philology.
https://www.unige.ch/lettres/alman/fr/enseignants/medieval/wetzel/

Laurence Wuidar, *1978
2007 PhD (musicology) Free University of Brussels; 2007 Frances A. Yates
Fellowship – Warburg Institute, London; 2008 Master Archivio Segreto Vaticano; 2008 Prix de l'Académie Royale de Belgique (Classe des Beaux-Arts); 2008-2012 FNRS (Belgium); 2014-2020 FNS University of Geneva. Since 2011, she teaches History of Medieval Philosophy at the domenican Studium of Bologna.
Research focuses: music and philosophy, theology, history of medicine, astrology, magic, demonology, mysticism from Patristic to 17th Century. https://www.studiofilosofico.it/docenti_elenco.php

Katharina Petra Gedigk, *1990
2009-2012 BA in History of Arts and German Studies at Justus-Liebig-University Giessen; 2012-2015 MA in German Literature at Eberhard-Karls-University Tübingen; 2015-2021 Assistant for German Language and Literature of the Middle Ages at the University of Geneva; 2021 PhD University of Geneva, with a thesis on exemplary mirrors in courtly literature of the 12th-14th centuries; since 2022 senior assistant for German language and literature of the Middle Ages at the University of Geneva. Research interests: courtly literature 12th-14th century, text-image relations, historical narratology
https://www.unige.ch/lettres/alman/fr/enseignants/medieval/katharina-wimmer/