"A Wanton Woman: The Life of Ida C. Craddock" from NPR by ALICE GREGORY

Ida C. Craddock. Don't feel bad if you've never heard of her. Neither had I. But according to her most recent biographer, Leigh Eric Schmidt, this is a travesty. She deserves a place in our pantheon of polymaths. A professor of American religious history at Harvard, Schmidt champions Craddock as a secular oracle, civil liberties proponent and religious therapist. His aim with the biography, Heaven's Bride, is to retroactively legitimize Craddock, a self-taught, quasi-academic dismissed by the intellectuals of her day and all but forgotten in ours. [...] And though auto-didacticism is not a glittery or singular enough basis upon which to historicize an individual, it becomes clear over the chapters that Craddock's most basic attributes — her "unregulated intelligence" and her "destructive impulse to impart knowledge without discrimination" — are actually her most impressive. Craddock's intellectual infatuations ran the gamut, but most were "peculiar" or at least arcane: Ouija boards, Alaskan totem poles, tantric yoga. She herself was a wunderkammer of marvels.

Read that full NPR feature story, here. Read an excerpt from the book, here. See also: Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality, Holy Fairs: Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism