During the Baroque period, sermons were an exceptionally popular and widely spread literary genre. With regard to their content, sermons could be classed as spiritual prose, i.e. prose that was written with a clear religious purpose. Up until 1730, spiritual prose represented a forty percent share of all the books published within the Holy Roman Empire. Once printed, sermons were read primarily by educated clergy but could also be used by anyone who knew how to read. More often than not, these lay readers were members of the bourgeois and the noble classes who, in order to cultivate piety in the privacy of their homes, liked to reach for religious literature. Three authors from the Slovenian territory who published their sermons in print form were Capuchin friars Janez Svetokriški and Rogerij Ljubljanski, and a Jesuit friar Jernej Basar. An extensive collection of sermons in Latin and German languages was also published by Janez Ludvik Schönleben and Andrej Klemenčič.

(from: Širca, Alen (2015). Slovenska baročna pridiga. Jezik in slovstvo, v. 65 (2022), no. 3–4, pp. 137–150.)