Pragmatic style-generating factors of the 17th century popular postil
The form of the popular postil, as a type of religious texts, is determined by two basic style-generating factors: the very effective and wide influence on masses of people and a well-determined receiver. The receiver is a simple, not well-educated man with a low social status. The aim of the present work is to show in what way those two factors determine the holistic shape of a text its content, composition, language and style. The collections of 17th-century Protestant preachers’s texts: Dambrowski’s Christian postylla and Gdacjusz’s Postylla popularis are the basic material for this article. Taking into consideration the Baroque preaching, those two collections of sermons are very typical and most interesting.