The rhetoric of the mustard seed Forms of argumentation in the early homilies of Jean-Pierre Camus

In the prefaces to his early books, Jean-Pierre Camus presents his homilies as unfinished. He states that their “shapeless mass” includes not only inventio, but also dispositio, and ­completely rejects, on the other hand, everything that falls under elocutio: these are argumentation frameworks that preachers can draw inspiration from. Examining the forms of argumentation in ­Camus’s sermons allows us to scrutinize those claims.