Archivum Lithuanicum

If register is an essential part of language description, as has been stressed in past decades, it cannot be left out of consideration in the historic stages of a language, even though we have no direct grasp of its situational-functional contexts there. Although time-consuming and methodologically challenging, this is a necessary undertaking. The paper takes up the challenge, using the examples of Old Lithuanian and Old Latvian, where the beginning of written transmission roughly coincides with the spread of the Reformation and its counter-

The article examines the second edition of Baltramiejus Vilentas’s Euangelias bei Epistolas (VEE, 1579), which Lozorius Zengštokas published under a similar title in 1612 (ZEE, 1612). Both editions consist of Bible readings arranged throughout the liturgical year. The aim of the study was to identify the sources of the readings added by Zengštokas and to assess the strategy of textual appropriation. The steps towards this goal were the following: (1) an overview of Zengštokas’s activities; (2) an assessment of the reasons for the publication of ZEE; (3) identification of the readings added to Zengštokas’s edition; (4) identification of their sources by means of comparative analysis, and (5) an assessment of the strategy of text appropriation on the basis of the intertextuality method. Zengštokas prepared a second edition of Vilentas’s book for several reasons: (1) the first edition had run out of print; (2) Jonas Bretkūnas’s Postilla (BP, 1591) contained too few biblical readings, especially epistolary ones, and therefore could not fully replace Vilentas’s book; (3) there was a shortage of readings for Sundays that were interspersed between the feast days during some years.