Article

Anna Kingsford and the Intuitive Science of Occultism

Details

Citation

Ferguson C (2022) Anna Kingsford and the Intuitive Science of Occultism. Aries, 22 (1), pp. 114-135. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700593-02201006

Abstract
Feminist, anti-vivisectionist, occultist, and one of the first British women to qualify as a medical doctor, Anna Kingsford remains notably absent from recent studies of Victorian science and spiritualism. Her efforts to synthesize occult and scientific worldviews have been side-lined by those of male contemporaries such as Oliver Lodge and Alfred Russel Wallace, ones whose professional status and gender coordinates more readily align with implicit assumptions about the kind of person for whom disenchantment posed an intellectual problem that might best be solved in the laboratory. My paper positions Kingsford at the very heart of the late Victorian project to accommodate scientific innovation and spiritual belief by tracing her attempts to forge an intuitive epistemology superior to what she viewed as the deeply suspect championship of objectivity. In doing so, it aims to expose and redress blind spots within recent esotericism studies-based approaches to the disenchantment debate.

Keywords
Anna Kingsford; disenchantment; intuition; occultism; women in medicine; feminist epistemology of science

Journal
Aries: Volume 22, Issue 1

StatusPublished
Publication date31/12/2022
Publication date online22/11/2021
Date accepted by journal22/11/2021
URLhttp://hdl.handle.net/1893/33755
ISSN1567-9896
eISSN1570-0593

People (1)

Professor Christine Ferguson

Professor Christine Ferguson

Professor in English, English Studies