These are all recurring motifs, as we've seen, in Menocchio's statements. And yet he had read the Sogno more than forty years after its publication, in a completely different situation. The council that should have healed the conflict between "the papists" and Luther-a conflict that Caravia compared to that between the two Friulian factions of the Strumieri and the Zamberlani had indeed taken place, but it had been a council of condemnations and not of concord. For men like Caravia, the Church outlined by the Tridentine decrees was certainly not the Church "made straight' and based on the"pure Gospel about which they had dreamed. And even Menocchio must have read the Sogno as a book that on many counts was tied to an age long since passed. Of course, the anticlerical orantitheological polemicsstillhada contemporaryring for reasons that we have already seen: but the more radical elements of Menocchio's religion went well beyond the Sogno. In the latter there was no trace of a denial of Christ's divinity, of the rejection of the integrity of Scripture, of the condemnation of baptism (although it was defined as "merchandise nor of the in exaltation of tolerance. Had it been Nicola da discriminate Porcia who had spoken to Menocchio about all this? In regard to tolerance, apparently, yes-if the identification of Nicola de Melchiori with Nicola da Porcia is correct. But all the evidence furnished by the inhabitants of Montereale indicates that the complex of Menocchio's ideas had formed long before the date of the first trial. It's true that we don't know how far back his relations with Nicola went: but Menocchio's obstinacy demonstrates that we aren't dealing with a passive reception of someone else's ideas.