Ronald Hutton

Ronald Hutton (born 1953) is an English historian who specializes in the study of Early Modern Britain, British folklore, pre-Christian religion and contemporary Paganism. A reader in the subject at the University of Bristol, Hutton has published fourteen books and has appeared on British television and radio. He has held a fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford and is a Commissioner of English Heritage.

Born in Ootacamund, India into a middle class English family, Hutton subsequently returned to England, attending a school in Illford and getting particularly interested in archaeology, taking part in a number of excavations until 1976 and touring the country's chambered tombs. Ultimately he decided to study history at Pembroke College, Cambridge and then Magdalen College, Oxford before gaining employment as a reader in history at the University of Bristol in 1981. Focusing his efforts on Early Modern Britain, he published a trio of books on the subject during that decade; The Royalist War Effort (1981), The Restoration (1985) and Charles the Second (1989).

During the 1990s he produced a string of books dealing with historical paganism, folklore and contemporary Paganism in Britain; The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles (1991), The Rise and Fall of Merry England (1994), The Stations of the Sun (1996) and The Triumph of the Moon (1999), the latter of which would come to be praised as a seminal text in the discipline of Pagan studies. In the following decade he moved on to look at other topics, publishing a book about Siberian shamanism in the western imagination, Shamans (2001), a collection of essays on folklore and Paganism, Witches, Druids and King Arthur (2003) and then two books on the role of the Druids in the British imagination, The Druids (2007) and Blood and Mistletoe (2009).