Ronald Hutton

Ronald Edmund Hutton (born 19 December 1953) is an English historian specialising in early modern Britain, British folklore, pre-Christian religion, and modern paganism. A professor at the University of Bristol, Hutton has written over a dozen books, often appearing 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).

He followed these with books about historical paganism, folklore, and modern 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 last of which would come to be praised as a seminal text in Pagan studies. Subsequent work include Shamans (2001), covering Siberian shamanism in the western imagination; Witches, Druids and King Arthur (2003), a collection of essays on folklore and Paganism; then two books on the role of the Druids in the British imagination: The Druids (2007) and Blood and Mistletoe (2009).

Elected a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales in 2011, then a Fellow of the British Academy in 2013, Hutton was appointed Gresham Professor of Divinity in 2022.