certain point someone way for the inquest. Menocchio's children, as we shall see, immediately suspected that the anonymous accuser was the priest of Monterea le, domodoricovorai, and they weren't mistaken. The two had a long-standing disagreement. For four years Menocchio actually had been going outside the town for confession. Granted, vorai's testimony, which closed the preliminary inquest, was singularly vague:"I don't rememberspecifically whatthings he said. I have a bad memory and had other things on my mind." Apparently, no one was in a better position to inform the Holyoffice on this matter than he was,butthe vicargeneral didn't press him.Hehadno need to; it had been vorai himself, instigated by another priest, don ottavio Montereale, a member of the local seigneurial family, who had furnished the circumstantial evidence on which the vicar general based the specific questions he addressed to the witnesses. The hostility ofthe local clergy can be easily explained. As we saw, Menocchio didn't recognize any special authority in the eccesiastical hierarchy when it came to questions of the faith: "What popes! What prelates! What priests! These words were spoken with contempt. Hejust did not believe in these people, Domenico Melchiori testified. By haranguing and arguing in the streets and inns, Menocchio must have ended by practically setting himself up againsttheauthority ofthe priest. But what was Menocchio saying, in fact? To begin with, not only did heblaspheme beyondmeasure" buthe also insisted that to blaspheme is not a sin(according to another witness, he had said that to blaspheme against the saints wasn't sinful, but to blaspheme against God was. He added sarcastically, "Everybody has his calling, some to plow, some to hoe, and I have mine, which is to blaspheme. He also said strange things, whichthe villagersreported ina more or less fragmentary and discomnected way tothe vicargeneral: The air is God...the earth isour mother", "Who do you imagine God tobe? God is nothing but a little breath,and whatever else manimagines him to be": "Everything that we see is God, and we are gods"; "The sky, earth, sea, air, abyss, and hell, allisGod";"What did youthink, that Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary?It's impossiblethatshegavebirthtohimand remained a virgin. It might very well have been this, that he was a good man, or the son of a good man." Finally, it was said that Menocchio possessed prohibited books, particularly the Bible in the vernacular:"He isalways arguing with one person or another, and he has the vernacular Bible and imagines that he bases his reasoning on it, and he remains obstinate in these arguments of his