The tinged words of wiseacres : Mikołaj Rej on art of embellishing words

The main purpose of the paper is to discuss Mikołaj Rej’s critic of rhetoric reduced to the art of embellishing words in his famous parenetical work The Image of a Good Man’s Life (Krakow 1567-68). Using the metaphor “the tinged words”, Renaissance author revoked well-know figure “colors of rhetoric” (colores rhetorici) in the context of contemporary sophists who were masters in multiplication of linguistic ornaments. For Rej, the simplicity of language (correlated in the light of the Good News with a Christian life) was the main condition of truth and truthfulness. Thus, the major rule of his rhetoric might be epitomized in two Latin words: sola veritas (‘only truth’).