Autobiografia di un visionario. John Dee ed Edward Kelley nel racconto di Francesco Pucci

In the 1580s, a group of Italian Jesuits working closely with the papal nuncio Alberto Bolognetti launched a massive campaign to return the populations of Cracow and Prague to Catholicism. This article discusses this phenomenon by taking the Italian heretic Francesco Pucci as a case study. After having spent a few years at Lyon, the Florentine heretic decided to leave Italy in search of the ‘divine truth’. His long religious pilgrimage across Europe took him from Paris to London and from Basel to Cracow and Prague. Two Englishmen played a major role in Pucci’s five-year process of reconciliation with Catholicism : the astrologer John Dee and the magician and charlatan Edward Kelley, both of whom Pucci met in Cracow in the early 1580s. A hitherto unknown account of this encounter, written by Pucci himself, is being published here for the first time.