The 19th century debate on animal magnetism viewed from Rome: the Holy Office’s decrees

From the end of the 1830s the Congregation of the Holy Office begun the exam of the doctrines and practices of animal magnetism and hypnosis, which led in in 1856 to the official condemnation of their ‘abuses’. The Roman Inquisition’s decrees responded to the demands addressed by ecclesiastic and civil authorities, and by a few Catholic physicians, mostly from Italy and French-speaking Europe, concerned about those phenomena, which questioned the borders between natural and supernatural and chal- lenged both theology and science. The aim of this article is to summarize such a debate, which helps to highlight the complex relationships between religion and science, made up of contraposition and concurrence, but also of complementarities and reciprocal transfers, in an age of general redefinition of the system of knowledge.