FRANCK or FRANK (latinized FRANCUS), SEBASTIAN (c. German freethinker, was born about 1499 at Donauworth, whence he styled himself Franck von Word. He entered the university of Ingoldstadt (1515) and proceeded thence to the Dominican College, incorporated with the univer sity, at Heidelberg. Having taken priest's orders, he held in 1524 a cure in the neighbourhood of Augsburg, but in 1525 went over to the Reformed party at Nuremberg and became preacher at Gustenfelden. His first work was a German translation with additions (1528) of the first part of the Diallage, or Conciliatio locorum Scripturae, directed against Sacramentarians and Ana baptists by Andrew Althamer, then deacon of St. Sebald's at Nuremberg. On March 17, 1528 he married Ottilie Beham, whose brothers, pupils of Albrecht Darer, had got into trouble through Anabaptist leanings. In 1529 he produced a free version (Klagbrief der armen Dur f tigen in England) of the famous Supplycacyon of the Beggers, of Simon Fish. In the autumn of 1529 he went to Strasbourg, and here began his intimacy with Caspar Schwenkfeld. Here, too, he published, in 1531, his most. important work, the Chronica, Zeitbuch and Geschichtsbibel, largely a compilation on the basis of the Nuremberg Chronicle . It is too much to call him "the first of German his torians" ; he is a forerunner of Gottfried Arnold, with more vigour and directness of purpose. Driven from Strasbourg by the authorities, after a short imprisonment in 1531, he tried to make a living as a soapboiler at Esslingen, removing in 1533 for a better market to Ulm, where (1534) he was admitted as a burgess.
His Weltbuch, a supplement to his Chronica, was printed at Tubingen in 1534; the publication, in the same year, of his Paradoxa at Ulm brought him into trouble with the authorities, and after the publication of his Guldin Arch (with pagan parallels to Christian sentiments) (Augsburg 1538) and Germaniae chronicon (Frankfort 1538) he had to leave Ulm (1539)• At Basel he found work as a printer, and here, probably, he died in the winter of 1542-43. He had published in 1539 Kriegbiichlein des Friedens (pseudonymous), Schrifitliche and ganz grundliche Auslegung des 64 Psalms, and Das verbiitschierte mit sieben Siegeln verschlossene Bach (a biblical index, exhibiting the dis sonance of Scripture) ; in 1S41 his Spruchworter (a collection of proverbs, several times reprinted with variations) ; in 1542 a new edition of his Paradoxa; and some smaller works.
Franck combined the humanist's passion for freedom with the mystic's devotion to the religion of the spirit. His breadth of human sympathy led him to positions which the comparative study of religions has made familiar, but for which his age was unprepared. Luther contemptuously dismissed him as a "devil's mouth." Pastor Frecht of Nuremberg pursued him with bitter zeal. In his last year, in a public Latin letter, he exhorted his friend John Campanus to maintain freedom of thought in face of the charge of heresy.
See Hegler, in Hauck's Realencyklopadie (1899) ; C. A. Hase, Sebastian Franck von Word (1869) ; J. F. Smith, in Theological Review (April 1874) ; E. Tausch, Sebastian Franck von Donauworth and seine Lehrer (1893) ; Prenzel, Kritische Untersuchung and Wiirdigung von Sebastian Franks "Chronicon Germaniae" (1908) ; R. Jones, Spiritual Reformers (1914) ; A. Reimann, Sebastian Franck als Geschichtsphilosoph (19a 1) .