Building on the work Florence Vuilleumier Laurens has devoted to the ars and the scientia symbolica of the Renaissance and the classical age (La Raison des figures symboliques [2000]), this volume treats a text that constitutes a major landmark in the history of the humanist symbolic system: the Syntagma de symbolis by the French humanist Claude Mignault, a work that made a decisive contribution to the development of a theory of the emblem in the last third of the sixteenth century. While this work is well known to specialists in emblem studies, it nevertheless lacked a study outlining its complex genesis and critical fortunes, and linking its theoretical content to the vast exegetical enterprise Mignault offers of Alciato's Emblemata. This has now been achieved thanks to the present volume, which has been meticulously prepared and is supplemented by a French edition and translation of the Syntagma.

In order to reveal all the editorial and theoretical issues involved in this exegesis, the author first outlines Mignault's rich career, taking care to recontextualize every time and place in which his thinking developed. This process reveals a highly interesting cross-fertilization between career and thought. The reader learns, for example, that Mignault gained a taste for Greek and Latin literatures early on, through contact with the libraries of the learned men of his acquaintance. When he first encountered Alciato's book, as part of these explorations, it seemed quite unintelligible to him. He then entered the University of Paris as a praeceptor at the Collège de Reims, where he contributed to scholarly editions, in particular to commentaries on classical texts, demonstrating a genuine concern for teaching. It was in this context that he developed an early version of his commentaries on Alciato's Emblemata, uniting his passion and his profession, which later gravitated toward the world of the magistrature.

The second part of the book considers the art of the commentary on the Auctores with the aim of elucidating Mignault's inspirations (Landino, Lipsius, Lambin) and his working methods: comparative exegesis and textual criticism, as well as the contribution of philosophy—in particular, the concept of the dialectic (through the example of Pierre de la Ramée)—constitute his main sources and methodological resources. What Vuilleumier Laurens outlines here is the meeting of humanism and Scholasticism, with the application of the method to literary analysis in effect testifying to the alliance of what animates Mignault's university teaching with his taste for classical literature. There follows a detailed analysis of the commentary on Alciato's Emblemata, an erudite work that identifies sources and elucidates the Italian jurist's thought by means of an analysis that is grammatical, rhetorical, historical, and mythological. Since each detail of Alciato's text is an allusive condensation of erudite knowledge, the annotation in turn becomes a major lesson in antiquity. Vuilleumier Laurens then considers Mignault's theorization of the function of allegorical thought, at the heart of which the emblem takes its place among all the other forms, ancient and modern, of figured thinking that make up the field of the ars symbolica. The analysis concludes with a discussion of the influence that the Syntagma exerted on Mignault's followers.

The intellectual appeal of Vuilleumier's work lies not only in the light it sheds on the editorial history of the Syntagma, entwined with the history of its author's intellectual journey, but also in the way it reveals to us the institutional world of humanist France during the turbulent reigns of Henri III and Henri IV. It further offers, through its notes and highly interesting appendixes, the vast majority of items in the source material, translated into French, not to mention a rich critical apparatus, whose substantial quantity at times overpowers the text itself. This perfectly documented investigation will be vital to scholars concerned with the reception of Alciato's Emblemata, as well as to anyone interested in humanist theories of the symbol.