Ephemeral newspaper and moralistic treatise — two genres of the seventeenth century moralist literature (based on the example of sensational news from the italian land)

The author’s objective is to discuss two different genres of the seventeenth century ephemeral papers which Konrad Zawadzki, the researcher of the origins of the Polish press, has included in a common group of so called “ephemeral newspapers”. The author of the article distinguishes, among those texts, extensive moralistic treatises, characterised by painstaking composition, expanded descriptive and instructive plots and domination of informative and didactic functions. In the seventeenth century, side by side with them the papers of small volume were printed and their authors and publishers were focussed on obtaining commercial goals. They differed a lot from didactic treatises with the form of communication: the content was often expressed through the technique of enumeration and accumulation of many sketches, appealing to the recipient’s imagination and emotions