{"id":2673,"date":"2011-05-20T08:57:12","date_gmt":"2011-05-20T14:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2673"},"modified":"2011-05-20T08:57:49","modified_gmt":"2011-05-20T14:57:49","slug":"caroline-tully-interviews-ronald-hutton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2673","title":{"rendered":"Caroline Tully Interviews Ronald Hutton"},"content":{"rendered":"

Australian blogger and graduate student Caroline Tully interviews Ronald Hutton on her blog, Necropolis Now<\/em>. <\/a><\/p>\n

One excerpt:<\/p>\n

In that case what is your relationship with Paganism?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It has been long and close. As I mentioned in my book Witches, Druids and King Arthur<\/em>, I was in fact brought up Pagan, in a modern English tradition which combined a reverence for the natural world with a love of the ancient Greek and Roman classics. I have been acquainted with Wiccan witches since my teens: I learned some things from Alex Sanders in his hey-day, and attended my first Wiccan rite at Halloween 1968. I have never undergone a conversion experience to any religion, and so my relationship with others, such as Christianity, is one of entirely benevolent neutrality. Over the years, I came to build up friendships with more or less all of the leading figures of British Paganism. For example, Doreen Valiente\u2019s respect for me meant that I was one of the few people whom she specified should be invited to her funeral, a gesture which still deeply moves me.<\/p>\n

My attitude to the history of modern Pagan witchcraft has altered with changing knowledge of it. Back in the 1960s I believed, following scholarly orthodoxy, that the witchcraft of the early modern European witch trials was a pagan religion. In 1973 I debated against the historian Norman Cohn (author of Europe\u2019s Inner Demons (1975), the work that accused Margaret Murray of having tampered with her sources to make them conform to her ideas about witchcraft) at Cambridge University, where I defended the historical legitimacy of Charles Godfrey Leland\u2019s \u2018witches\u2019 gospel\u2019, Aradia<\/em>, and was floored by him. After that, as I read more and more of the new research and checked the original records (for England and Scotland) myself, my belief in the idea that witches were members of an ancient pagan religion gradually evaporated.<\/p>\n

So, you are not actually hostile to Paganism as some people seem to think?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The story of my life would be inexplicable if that were the case.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The forthcoming issue of The Pomegranate<\/em><\/a>, now in press, will carry a review essay by Hutton\u2014a retrospective of his own work and a response to some of his critics\u2014as well as some related reviews on the topic of Wiccans and their relationship to history.<\/p>\n

Some of this material will be available free on the Web, and I will post links as soon as I can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Australian blogger and graduate student Caroline Tully interviews Ronald Hutton on her blog, Necropolis Now. One excerpt: In that case what is your relationship with Paganism? It has been long and close. As I mentioned in my book Witches, Druids and King Arthur, I was in fact brought up Pagan, in a modern English tradition […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5,4],"class_list":["post-2673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-paganism","tag-scholarship"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-H7","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2741,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2741","url_meta":{"origin":2673,"position":0},"title":"Ronald Hutton Responds to His Critics","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 6, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Even before his interview with Australian scholar\/blogger Caroline Tully, Ronald Hutton had written a lengthy article for The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies titled \"Writing the History of Witchcraft: A Personal View.\" It is now available as a free download from Equinox Publishing. In it, Professor Hutton discusses\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"books\"","block_context":{"text":"books","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=books"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":14146,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=14146","url_meta":{"origin":2673,"position":1},"title":"All Those Witches: Caroline Tully Sorts Them Out","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 4, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"\/ Caroline Tully, Pomegranate associate editor and long-time denizen of the Australian Pagan scene, gots onto an Australian podcast,The Briefing, as Witch-with-a-PhD to sort of in a very short time the difference between Wiccan witches, Etsy witches, and the rest of the social media witch-fauna. Released on Halloween 2025, of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Australia\"","block_context":{"text":"Australia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=australia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10422,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10422","url_meta":{"origin":2673,"position":2},"title":"A Festschrift for Ronald Hutton","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 28, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Magic and Witchery: Celebrating the Twentieth Anniversary of 'The Triumph of the Moon' will be published in September by Palgrave Macmillan. I love rolling the word Festschrift around, and if you are not used to it, this is what it means: \"In academia, a Festschrift\u00a0 (plural Festschriften) is a book\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/magic-and-witchery-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3829,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3829","url_meta":{"origin":2673,"position":3},"title":"Five Kinds of “Witch” and Other Reflections on the Academic Study of Contemporary Paganism","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 15, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Australian writer, blogger, and scholar Caroline Tully continues her interview with Professor Ronald Hutton on the history of witchcraft and related topics. On the perceptions of conflict between scholars and practitioners: When some Pagans now express hostility to academics, they are generally doing so in defence of ideas which were\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Australia\"","block_context":{"text":"Australia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=australia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12680,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=12680","url_meta":{"origin":2673,"position":4},"title":"Ronald Hutton’s Goddess Book Available for Pre-order","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 27, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"From the publisher, Yale University Press: In this riveting account, renowned scholar Ronald Hutton explores the history of deity-like figures in Christian Europe. Drawing on anthropology, archaeology, literature, and history, Hutton shows how hags, witches, the fairy queen, and the Green Man all came to be, and how they changed\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"England\"","block_context":{"text":"England","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=england"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/queens-of-the-wild.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":13198,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=13198","url_meta":{"origin":2673,"position":5},"title":"The First Wiccan Book Published in India","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 7, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"A little more than twenty years ago, in the preference to his landmark study of contemporary Pagan Witchcraft, The Triumph of the Moon, the historian Ronald Hutton wrote that \"the unique significance of pagan [sic] witchcraft to history is that it is the only religion which England has even given\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"India\"","block_context":{"text":"India","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=india"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/ANI-20221216115613-300x205.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2673"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2675,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2673\/revisions\/2675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}