Ronald Hutton

Ronald Edmund Hutton (born 19 December 1953) is an Indian-born English historian specialising in early modern Britain, British calendar customs, pre-Christian religion, and modern paganism. A professor at the University of Bristol and Gresham College, Hutton has written over a dozen books and often appears on British television and radio. Born in Ootacamund, India, Hutton returned to England as a child, where he attended school in Ilford. Interested in archaeology, he volunteered on various excavations. He studied history at Pembroke College, Cambridge and then took a DPhil at Magdalen College, Oxford, before securing a position at the University of Bristol in 1981. Specialising in early modern Britain, he wrote four books on the subject: The Royalist War Effort (1981), The Restoration (1985), Charles the Second (1989), and The British Republic (1990). He followed these with three books on Britain's pre-Christian religions and calendar customs: The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles (1991), The Rise and Fall of Merry England (1994), and The Stations of the Sun (1996). These were followed by The Triumph of the Moon (1999), an examination of Wicca's history which would receive praise as a seminal text in Pagan studies. After Shamans (2001), which considered Western perceptions of Siberian shamanism, Hutton focused on the role of the druids in the British imagination, producing two books, The Druids (2007) and Blood and Mistletoe (2009). Revising his earlier approach to pre-Christian religion with Pagan Britain (2013), he then addressed witchcraft for The Witch (2017) before beginning work on a three-volume biography of Oliver Cromwell (2021-24). In addition to appearing in various television documentaries, he fronted his own series, Professor Hutton's Curiosities, in 2013. After 2009 he also became a commissioner and then a trustee of English Heritage, a chair of the organisation's blue plaque committee, and academic advisor...