Lyon and Louise of Savoy: physician to the queen mother

In 1524 Agrippa arrived in Lyon with a prestigious appointment: physician to Louise of Savoy, mother of King Francis I of France. For a scholar always seeking stability it was the highest point he had ever reached, a place at the court of one of the most powerful rulers in Europe. Yet it was in Lyon that the deepest crisis of his intellectual life matured, and the stay ended in a bitter break.

Lyon, capital of the book

Lyon was then one of the liveliest cities in France, a great centre of trade and banking thanks to its fairs, and above all a capital of printing alongside Paris. Florentine and Lucchese merchants and bankers had branches there, and Italian influence was felt everywhere. The court often stayed there during the Italian Wars, because the city was the natural base for expeditions across the Alps.

A few years later, from 1532, Lyon would also welcome François Rabelais as physician at the city hospital, and the first books of Pantagruel would appear there. The setting was rich in humanists, poets and printers, fertile ground for someone like Agrippa who was looking for readers and patrons. It was a Lyon edition of his works, issued around 1600, that would later gather his treatises and letters in two volumes.

The queen mother and the stars

Louise of Savoy was a cultivated and politically very skilful woman. When in February 1525 Francis I was defeated and taken prisoner by the Imperial forces at the battle of Pavia, it was she who governed France as regent. In that climate of anxiety the court asked Agrippa for astrological forecasts on the outcome of events. Agrippa, who like many physicians of the time knew astrology, proved reluctant.

In the letters of those years he called astrology a vain and uncertain art and complained of being valued more as a fortune-teller than as a physician and philosopher. His irritation reached the ears of the queen mother and helped to cool relations. To this was added a concrete problem: the promised pension was not being paid, and Agrippa found himself living among debts and unanswered petitions.

The De vanitate and departure

It was in this situation that, in 1526, Agrippa wrote in Lyon the De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum, the book in which he attacked all the human arts and sciences, astrology and magic included. It is not hard to read in it the outburst of a man disappointed by courts and by the forms of knowledge practised there. The work, however, goes far beyond personal polemic and became one of the most influential texts of Renaissance scepticism.

At the end of 1527 Agrippa left Lyon, deprived of his pension and fallen from favour, and after passing through Paris he headed for the Low Countries. His resentment towards Louise of Savoy did not fade: years later, some of his remarks against the queen mother cost him arrest in France, shortly before his death. The Lyon period thus remains the dramatic heart of his biography, the moment when the magus became a critic of magic.