The Victorian origins of ‘medieval’ folklore

I would guess that contemporary pagans have a love-hate relationship with Ronald Hutton. With books such as The Triumph of the Moon and Stations of the Sun, scholarly accounts of the history of modern witchcraft and the ritual year in Britain, no one writes more sensitively about their worldview. On the other hand, as an academic, Hutton assiduously seeks to saw off the branch on which many of their fondest assumptions sit. The paradox can be explained.

Queens of the Wild returns to one of Hutton’s key themes: the debunking of the idea that pagan practices and beliefs survived intact in Europe from archaic times. With characteristic frankness he explains in his preface that the alluring title is the result of a compromise between the demands of the marketing department and his own ‘pedantic anxiety to settle on one that most accurately [reflects] the contents of the book’. It is briefer than his previous works and, with its attractive packaging, this is Hutton at his most accessible.