Update from the Doreen Valiente Foundation!!!!
On July 12 2022 Professor Ronald Hutton graciously accepted the role of Patron on the Doreen Valiente Foundation. We congratulate him in taking on this role and together we will be moving forward with our exciting plans to expand our work and presence in the world of Cultural Heritage both tangible and intangible.
Ronald Edmund Hutton (born 19 December 1953) is an English historian who specialises in Early Modern Britain, British folklore, pre-Christian religion and Contemporary Paganism. He is a professor at the University of Bristol, has written 14 books and has appeared on British television and radio. He held a fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, and is a Commissioner of English Heritage.
Born in Ootacamund, India, his family returned to England, and he attended a school in Ilford and became particularly interested in archaeology. He volunteered in a number of excavations until 1976 and visited the country’s chambered tombs. He studied history at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and then Magdalen College, Oxford, before he lectured in history at the University of Bristol from 1981. Specialising in Early Modern Britain, he wrote three books on the subject: The Royalist War Effort (1981), The Restoration (1985) and Charles the Second (1990).
In the 1990s, he wrote books about 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 wrote on other topics: 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).
His latest book Queens of the Wild, published 2022 by Yale University Press can be purchased here
Professor Hutton took his first two degrees at Cambridge and his doctorate at Oxford, where he held his first post as a Fellow of Magdalen College.
In 1981 he moved to Bristol University, where he attained the position of Professor of History in 1996 and still serves in it. He has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Antiquaries, the Learned Society of Wales and the British Academy.
In addition to having been a Doreen Valiente Foundation Trustee, now Patron, he is a Trustee of English Heritage. He is a regular contributor to history programmes, debates and podcasts in the mass media, and is the author of sixteen books and of eighty-one articles in academic journals.
He has two main areas of expertise: the early modern period in Britain, and the history of ancient and modern paganism and beliefs concerning magic and witchcraft.
Professor Ronald Hutton gives his time for free, please donate to help us with our admin costs