Francesco Pucci

Francesco Pucci (1543 – 5 July 1597) was an Italian philosopher and humanist.

Pucci was born in Figline Valdarno. He was of the same family as the Cardinals Lorenzo Pucci, Roberto Pucci, and Antonio Pucci. He worked began in a mercantile house at Lyon and came into contact with the Protestant Reformation. He made his way to London, where he became acquainted with Antonio de Corro.

In 1572 he went to Oxford, apparently expecting to find sympathy with his antagonism to the Calvinistic tendency in Protestantism. On 18 May 1574 he was admitted M.A. He applied for a post of lecturer in theology, but his disputations soon annoyed the authorities, who expelled him (before June 1575) from the university. John Rainolds noted his departure with approval. In 1575–7 he was in London, communicating with the Italian congregation of the strangers' church, but unsettled in his views.

He corresponded with Francesco Betti, a Roman of noble family, who advised him to come to Basle and lay his difficulties before Fausto Paulo Sozzini (Socinus). Pucci reached Basle about May 1577, and held a written disputation with Sozzini on the question of immortality. Pucci regarded all creatures as imperishable; Sozzini denied the natural immortality of man, treating a future life as a conditional privilege. On 4 June Pucci formulated his positions, under ten heads; Sozzini replied on 11 June; Pucci finished a rejoinder on 1 July. The discussion was interrupted by the expulsion of Pucci from Basle. He had publicly maintained an extreme form of Pelagianism, printing theses, ‘De Fide natura hominibus universis insita,’ in which he claimed that all men are by nature in a state of salvation. Soon afterwards an epidemic drove Sozzini from Basle; he completed an answer to Pucci at Zürich on 27 January 1578. This, in the following October, he forwarded to Pucci, who made notes on the margin of the manuscript, but wrote no formal reply.

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