Born in Cologne in 1486: the origins of Agrippa of Nettesheim

Henry Cornelius Agrippa came into the world in Cologne on 14 September 1486, according to the date most biographers accept. His Latin name, Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, already contains a small story: his baptismal name was Heinrich, while Cornelius and Agrippa are humanist elements linking the young man to his city, founded by the Romans as Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium. The reference to Agrippina and to the general Marcus Agrippa was a learned tribute to his homeland, in keeping with the taste of the scholars of the time.

The name of Nettesheim

The title “of Nettesheim” refers to a place in the Rhineland countryside near Neuss, not far from Cologne. Agrippa used it as a family title and liked to present himself as the descendant of a noble line in the service of the emperors. Documentary evidence for this nobility is scarce, and scholars tend to regard it as partly a personal construction. For an intellectual without a fixed income, an illustrious origin was a precious card at court, where birth counted as much as learning.

Little is known about the family. His letters suggest that his father and forebears had served the House of Habsburg, but we do not know their names or offices with any certainty. This silence is itself significant: much of what we know about Agrippa's life comes from his correspondence, a lively source but inevitably a partial one.

Cologne at the end of the fifteenth century

The Cologne in which he grew up was one of the largest cities of the Empire, a free imperial city, seat of a powerful prince-archbishop and elector, and home to a university founded in 1388. Its churches held the relics of the Three Kings, a goal of pilgrims from all over Europe, and the unfinished building site of the cathedral dominated the city's skyline. It was a setting rich in trade, printing houses and religious orders, where scholasticism still dominated teaching.

It was in Cologne that Albert the Great had taught in the thirteenth century, the Dominican who had written on minerals, plants and animals, and to whom tradition also attributed works on the secret virtues of things. His tomb lay in the Dominican church. For a curious boy, growing up in the shadow of this memory meant encountering early on the idea of a science of nature open to hidden phenomena.

A youth between books and ambitions

Agrippa himself later recalled that he had been drawn from a very early age to books dealing with natural secrets and marvels. It is a retrospective testimony, written when he was already known as an author on magic, and it should be read with caution. Still, it remains plausible that the libraries of a university city and the legacy of Albert offered him his first texts. In any case, at the age of thirteen we already find him enrolled at the city's university, a sign of precocious schooling and of a family attentive to education.

Agrippa's origins explain much of his path: a German from the Rhineland, nourished on scholasticism and on memories of Albert, who would spend his life travelling between France, Italy, Switzerland and the Low Countries. Cologne remained a constant point of reference. It was in his native city that, almost fifty years later, he finally saw printed the work that would make him famous, the De occulta philosophia, published in 1533 under the protection of Archbishop Hermann von Wied.