Francesco Pucci

Francesco Pucci (1543 to 1597) was an Italian philosopher and humanist, born in Figline Valdarno into the family of the cardinals Lorenzo, Roberto and Antonio Pucci. He began in a mercantile house at Lyon, met the Protestant Reformation, and moved to London and then Oxford, where he took an M.A. in 1574 but was expelled from the university by 1575 for his disputations. At Basel in 1577 he held a written disputation with Fausto Sozzini on the question of immortality, maintaining that all creatures are imperishable and, in theses on faith, that all people are by nature in a state of salvation, an extreme form of Pelagianism for which he was expelled. He later met Justus Lipsius at Leiden, joined Sozzini in Poland, travelled to Prague with John Dee and Edward Kelley, and there returned to the Roman Catholic communion. His treatise on the efficacy of Christ in every individual, printed at Gouda in 1592, drew replies from Lucas Osiander and Nicholas Serarius.