Ronald Hutton - Personal Life

Personal Life

"My colleagues would kill me for saying this, but historians are increasingly conscious of the fact that we can't write history. What we can write about is the way in which people see history and think history happens."

Hutton on history, 2007.

Although he has written much on the subject of Paganism, Hutton insists that his own religious beliefs are a private matter. He has instead stated that "to some extent history occupies the space in my life filled in that of others by religion or spirituality. It defines much of the way I come to terms with the cosmos, and with past, present and future." Nonetheless, he has become a "well-known and much loved figure" in the British Pagan community.

Interviewing Hutton for The Independent, the journalist Gary Lachman commented that he had "a very pragmatic, creative attitude, recognising that factual error can still produce beneficial results", for instance noting that even though their theories about the Early Modern Witch-Cult were erroneous, Margaret Murray and Gerald Gardner would help lay the foundations for the creation of the new religious movement of Wicca.

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