ABSTRACT
This chapter presents three case studies in Victorian women's mystical practices: Camilla Crosland's seance with her medium's spirit-control, "Vastness"; Harriet Martineau's mesmeric trance-state; and professional novelist Florence Marryat's seances with her friend the professional medium, Miss Showers. In all three cases, mystical fringe theologies profoundly shaped and changed these women's lives and community membership. The consideration of Victorian women's theology is important because theirs was an intervention into a primarily masculinist discourse that was based too often on a logic of fixed dominance and submission. Victorian women's mystical fringe theology, however, was invested in creating an alternate sphere of discourse. The extra spheres of mystical women's theology contained challenging ideas concerning the nature of God and of history. These women's primary identification with this "extra space" necessitates thinking about new and more accurate models of a mystical woman's subjectivity.
