Ronald Hutton

Ronald Hutton, author of The Royalist War Effort, teaches at Bristol University.

Fenmen

Ronald Hutton, 5 August 1982

In previous centuries most histories of the English Revolution were coloured by the rival ideologies of Royalist and Roundhead. In the past few generations the division has tended to be drawn instead between the followers of Karl Marx and those of Samuel Gardiner, between those who see political action as an expression of tensions within society as a whole and those who see the vital political events as occurring at the centre and echoing in the provinces. The two latest books upon the period represent, in very different ways, the latest developments in the second tradition. Both possess other similarities, which mark them as belonging to the same stage in the life of man as historian. Both are monographs, produced by professionals with a long career of research behind them, basing their work on an analysis of all surviving sources for their subjects. Both, moreover, display what I might term ‘the growth of consensus politics among Civil War historians’, establishing their work in a sequence produced by those with whom they differ only on details.

Lady with the Iron Nose: Pagan Survival

Tom Shippey, 3 November 2022

Nature, witches and matriarchy formed a complex of which many disapproved, and it was pushed into remote places. Who knew what those peasants were doing in the dark?

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Unnatural Rebellion: ‘Witches’

Malcolm Gaskill, 2 November 2017

We are, to an alarming extent, who we once were, which explains why witches past and present are made by us and live with us.

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Jigsaw Mummies: Pagan Britain

Tom Shippey, 6 November 2014

The history​ of paganism in Britain spans more than thirty thousand years, almost the whole time that humans have inhabited these islands, bar a few state-enforced Christian centuries in the...

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Bardism: The Druids

Tom Shippey, 9 July 2009

When I first met Ronald Hutton, at a conference in Montana ten years ago, he remarked that if you looked at a modern book on druids, what you were likely to find was a number of chapters about...

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Lighting-Up Time

Wendy Doniger, 6 March 1997

By what witchcraft did I receive this book about so-called pagan festivals on the same day that the Times ran an article on an organisation that calls itself the Pagan Hospice and Funeral Trust?...

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Maypoles

Conrad Russell, 5 September 1985

During the years 1659-60, England enjoyed (if that is the right word) more constitutions than in the whole of the remaining eleven hundred and more years of its history as a united country. In an...

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War without an Enemy

Blair Worden, 21 January 1982

The political troubles of mid-17th-century England will not go away. Every generation of professional historians – the Victorians Gardiner and Firth, who laid the chronological foundation;...

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