Geneva and Fribourg: Agrippa's Swiss years as a physician

After leaving Metz and after the death of his first wife in 1521, Agrippa sought a new position in the cities of western Switzerland. Between 1521 and 1524 he lived first in Geneva and then in Fribourg, earning his living mainly as a physician. These years are less documented than others, but they are important for understanding the shift from the enthusiastic humanist of the Italian years to the disillusioned critic who would write the De vanitate scientiarum.

In Geneva, a new marriage

Geneva was then an episcopal city, still Catholic and tied to the Dukes of Savoy, but already crossed by political tensions that in the following years would lead it to ally with Bern and Fribourg and finally to embrace the Reformation. There Agrippa found friends and patrons, and in 1521 he married for the second time a young Genevan woman of good family, Jeanne-Loyse Tissié. Several children were born of the marriage, and the family followed Agrippa in his later moves, as far as Antwerp.

Agrippa hoped to obtain a stable post with Duke Charles III of Savoy, whom he had already met during his Italian years. The letters speak of promises and of a pension that never materialised. Meanwhile he practised medicine, an activity for which he claimed a doctor's title whose academic origin is not documented, but which he practised steadily for the rest of his life.

Physician to the city of Fribourg

In 1523 the city of Fribourg, in Switzerland, hired him as public physician on a regular salary. It was a civic role similar to the one he had held at Metz: the city physician treated the inhabitants, watched over epidemics and advised the authorities on matters of public health. Fribourg, unlike other Swiss cities, remained loyal to the Church of Rome, but it felt the religious ferment stirred by Zwingli in Zurich and by Luther in Germany.

Agrippa never formally joined the Reformation and died in Catholic communion. Nevertheless he looked with interest at the criticism of clerical corruption and at the call for a return to Scripture, themes that emerge strongly in his later writings. The stay in Fribourg lasted about a year: early in 1524 he left for Lyon.

The meaning of the Swiss years

Historians see this period as a moment of transition. His passion for magic and Kabbalah did not disappear, but a growing doubt took root in Agrippa about the human capacity to know the truth without the help of faith. The daily experience of medicine, with its limits and failures, probably contributed to this disillusionment, which two years later would find a voice in his great indictment of all the sciences.

The Swiss period also shows the typical condition of the wandering scholar of the early sixteenth century: temporary civic posts, marriages that created local ties, hopes placed in princes and almost always disappointed. Agrippa moved wherever there was a post to fill, taking with him his family, his books and his manuscripts, including that of the De occulta philosophia, which he kept enriching with new reading and new notes.