To Which Literary Genre Does Dobri nauci Belong?

Marulić’s poem Dobri nauci (Good Lessons), in 866 double rhymed dodecasyllabics without a transferred rhyme, is his longest Croatian verse work after Judita. The epyllion Suzana has 780 verses, Svarh muke Isukarstove 676, Stumačen’je Kata 592 and so on. In this text, Dobri nauci is identified as a rhymed popular sermon. This genre developed from the combination of a number of elements: from medieval didactic poetry in the vernacular; from prose sermons for the commons into which versified fragments were occasionally interpolated to fasten the attention of the listener and aid the memorisation of the lesson; from the Latin sermons in rhymed prose (sermones rimati) or in verse that appeared in the 13th and 14th centuries. A very striking feature of the poem Dobri nauci is the powerful suasive tone that is manifested in the so-called external dialogue, i.e., in the frequent direct addresses to the recipient. The signals of the external dialogue in the poem are the very frequent vocatives, the imperatives, questions and answers, rhetorical questions, affective exclamations, the stress on the presence of the narrator, the accent on the first person form, with frequent morphological variations on the first person pronoun, the negative ethos (sinner am I most great and so on). All this is characteristic of a direct, oral contact between speaker and listeners. The intended public determines the scope of themes of Dobri nauci and the nature of its expressive resources. The popular sermon, that is, does not achieve its aims by argument and theory, but by a pragmatic approach; in it the dogmas of faith are not considered, but practical moral lessons are stated. In Dobri nauci simple moral sententiae are used, and vivid sections that describe the transitoriness of glory, power and wealth, personified death and the pains of perdition. The favourite idea of death the leveller is brought in, with diatribes about the general decadence, in which there are also elements of satire. In particular, Marulić castigates the secular habits of the religious (they dance, play music, dress in a dandified way, think only of drinking and eating etc.). In Dobri nauci Marulić is fond of using a low, colloquial vocabulary; the syntax is simple, the style almost without figures of speech, except for a few brief similes. There is a total absence of his otherwise favourite allegorical interpretations. Marulić here does not even make use of examples, of exemplary tales, parables, which are actually elsewhere a common ingredient in the popular sermon. Finally, through its composition Dobri nauci meets the demand for the simplicity appropriate for a popular sermon. One extratextual circumstance could be considered to be in favour of the generic attribution of Dobri nauci proposed. The report of the Rector of Split, Franceso Celsi, to the Venetian government in 1518, says that Marulić held minatory talks for the youth, using posters of a kind, on which brutissime figure were shown, probably relating to the depiction of the pains of hell. Giving us important testimony about how effectively Marulić performed this public preaching (not liturgical) role, this source, because of the contents of the drawings mentioned, and the age of the listeners, suggests to us that he had before him in Dobri nauci the textual model of his obviously well pre-pared (and multimedia, as we might say today) appearances on the streets of Split