As Ronald Hutton says in the introduction, this set of cassettes is designed to be listened to while you are actually strolling or driving the streets of London, looking at the sites he's describing. If, instead of touring in London you're walking the dogs in Seattle (or wherever), you'll get a little less out of the experience. But I still think it's worth the trip for anyone interested in the history of one of the world's great cities.

I've seen Dr Hutton on various TV documentaries in the past, and had made a vague note to myself to look up his work. Listening to him on these tapes is as pleasant an experience as the AudioFile review on this page suggests, and I'm looking forward to delving into his written works.

I imagine this sort of tape to be British history the way many American tourists like it: Romantic, filled with monarchy and romance and treasure and death, with the occasional surprising fact, several of the guide's personal favorites thrown in, and over in an afternoon ... on to dinner in an 'authentic' English pub.

I don't mean to belittle these tapes, because I really quite enjoyed taking this trip with Dr Hutton. If and when I ever get back there, I would seriously consider taking these tapes with me and following the path he takes his listeners on. And I suppose that's really the point, isn't it?

This is the best audiotape--no holds barred--I've ever listened to. Ronald Hutton takes the listener on a tour of the homes and towns of some of Britain's greatest writers.

First of all, Ronald Hutton has a wonderful voice. It is the quinessential English voice. The voice all we Americans think IS England. It isn't. But it sounds wonderful anyway. Secondly, although Ronald Hutton doesn't have a great deal of time to spend on each writer and although what he is saying is not all that new, each minibiography is presented in a fresh and interesting way. The result, in my case at least, was to motivate me to find out more.

There is a simple theme driving the narration: writers write under pressure, to relieve it or in spite of it. Ronald Hutton makes a convincing argument, and the listener comes away appreciating the work and ambition (let alone talent) of writers like Hardy, Austen, Shakespeare, Thackery, Burns, Scott, Dickens, just to name a few.

Recommendation: Look in your library if you can't track down a copy to buy.

WITCHCRAFT AND MAGIC IN EUROPE - THE TWENTIETH CENTURY is number six in a series of six volumes covering the history of magic and witchcraft in Europe from ancient to modern times. Most of these volumes have included first rate scholarship. The fourth (and last) volume in the series, entitled, "The Period of the Witch Trials," will be published later this year.

Series authors have attempted to define witchcraft and magic for each of the covered periods. The major impression one receives on reading these books is that the concepts or witchcraft and magic as well as the operational definitions are many and varied. As Willem de Blecourt of the Huizinga Institute in the Netherlands notes in his section in this volume, "Local witchcraft discourses are accentuated and even defined by the locally current value systems." Blecourt's article is by far the best of the three in the book.

The first two sections of this book deal with witchcraft (Ronald Hutton, Bristol University) and Satanism (Jean la Fontaine, London School of Economics) as practiced in the 20th Century according to "modern" practitioners. These two sections are really more news article than scholarly essay. Each author has assembled material widely available to the public in autobiographical and biographical form, and to a certain extent "participated" in and "observed" some of the practices discussed. Both authors make it clear that Wicca (the Anglo-Saxon variant) and Satanism have nothing to do with each other. Wicca, or witchcraft as some practitioners prefer to call it, is considered by it's adherents to predate Christianity by several million years. Satanism, on the other hand, is based on the Hebrew word that means "the opposed" and requires historical references to Christianity that Wiccans eschew. The members of these two very different groups apparently loath each other. Many of the Wiccans are feminists while many of the Satanists have connections to neo-Nazis. The rationale for Wiccans is love the Earth, while that of the Satanists appears to be tear it up. Apparently, overly zealous and poorly educated Christians confuse the two. The Wiccans have been invited by the Archbishop to Canterbury Cathedral, the Satanists have not.

My favorite essay is the last, Blecourt's piece on witchcraft in Europe from the anthropologist's perspective. Most of his material comes from France, Spain, and the Netherlands. He includes material on Frisian witches, the work of Pitt-Rivers (an institute at Oxford University is named for him) who became famous for his studies of witchcraft in Andalusia, and Favret-Saada who studied witchcraft in the Bocage in France. Blecourt suggests anthropologists are faced with a perplexing situation in the attempt to study witchcraft-who to adopt as an informer. The person who informs you shapes your experience. The witch, the bewitched, and the unwitcher form a triangle with three perspectives. In the end, each will have a different tale, but you won't be able to get all three of them to confide in you. Blecourt suggests all the ethnographer can do is see witchcraft from a liminal perspective-i.e. barely at all or at the edge of perception.

This book is one in an excellent continuing series of "Witchcraft and Magic in Europe". This entry in the series concerns the history and practice of European witchcraft and magic in the 20th century,(and the book is focused on Europe and particularly Britain. There is only scant information on witchcraft and magic in North America). This is a refreshing objective study which approaches the subject from a sociological/anthropological approach; it is not intended as an apologia for witchcraft or neo-paganism, nor is it intended as a deconstruction of the topics. Also refreshing is that the writers spend little time "psychoanalyzing" and "rationalizing". What you get here is factual, fairly objective reporting. The book is divided in three sections: I.Modern Pagan Witchcraft-it's cultural and spiritual antecedents and history. Especially important here is the treatment of Margaret Murray, Gerald Gardner and Crowley. Also fascinating is the information provided on how the "paganism" of the Romantic Movement provided impetus for the later development of full blown "pagan revival" religions. (Also, as an enticement for you...did you know that Wicca and the Boy Scouts have a common ancestor! ) For readers hungry for historical facts on the "new" religions of Wicca and NeoPaganism, this section of the book provides valuable information. The author of this section, Ronald Hutton of the University of Bristol, seems confident that Wiccans and NeoPagans are ready for this kind of objective exegesis. I'm not so sure... II.Satanism and Satanic Mythology-written by Jean La Fontaine of the London School of Economics; level-headed and factual. La Fontaine details the brief history of this small and very recent religious movement and also debunks much of the satanic abuse hysteria whipped up by some conservative Christian groups, there just ain't no "there" there when it comes to these charges. As in the Pagan Witchcraft section, La Fontaine does not bore us with trite psychoanalysis, but just good reporting. Important here is the objective study La Fontaine gives to The Church of Set as opposed to La Vey Satanism; heretofore most studies of these two movements have taken "sides" in the oft-times bitter feuding between the two. My only objection to this section is the lumping of Asatru/Odinism and Northern European Heathenism in this section instead of either in a section of it's own or as a corollary section to Pagan Witchcraft. While some, if not most, of Northern European Heathenism does contain some of the same religio-political concerns as some satanic groups, it is also strikingly dis-similar and deserves to be studied in its own right rather as a "cousin" of satanism. III.The Continued Existence of Traditional Witchcraft...maybe. This section, actually an overview of the cultural anthropology of witch folklore and "bewitchment", demonstrates how difficult it is to really form a cohesive argument that if organized witchcraft existed at all in the past, there is very little evidence for it. All we have is a bewildering host of healing traditions, "hexes" and remedies against hexes, and whether this is evidence of the survival of witchcraft, shamanism or simply folk-ways, is hard to say. The authors are remarkably open to the possibility of real withcraft traditions that pre-date Wicca, but demonstrate the lack of evidence for it. For students of Mysticism, religious arcana and the Occult, this volume provides a wealth of information about this fascinating, and curious, part of the Western Esoteric Tradition.

For decades scholars have been misdirected and sidetracked in their study of witchcraft due to an almost singular focus on the writings of Gerald Gardner, Gardnerian Wicca, and all that evolved from this singular core. Hutton's book is a primary example of this tunnel vision approach to the study of witchcraft as an ongoing religion.

Gerald Gardner was simply one man living on a small island nation, who made certain claims about being involved with various groups and individuals alledged to belong to a religion he called Wicca. What he discovered (or as some people claim he invented) has little to do with witchcraft as a whole.

Witchcraft existed long before Gardner and has continued on quite nicely without him and what he generated. One of the major failings of Hutton's book is that it treats Gardner and Gardnerian Wicca as being the history of modern witchcraft as a whole. It is not, it is instead simply the history of one thing that became public in England and was then carried to other regions of Europe and to the United States.

Hutton's book, taken strictly as a history of Gardnerian Wicca and its offshoots, seems sound enough for what it is. I don't know for sure and it's really not all that important. I was simpy disappointed that this book claimed to be a history of modern pagan witchcraft when what it actually presents is an indepth look at the view of one man (Gardner) and the things that sprang from his writings on it. Perhaps the book should have been subtitled: A history of Modern Wicca from the time of Gerald Gardner.

This belongs on your shelf right next to Margot Adler's _Drawing Down the Moon_ if you are pagan or interested in Neo-pagan history. Ronald Hutton's new book is the only complete history of Neo-paganism (addressing both pre- and post-Gardner history) available to the pagan community. Written thoughtfully by by a historian who possesses impeccable research skills, healthy skepticism, an open mind and a willingness to admit ambiguity, Hutton deals with some of the complex aspects of Wiccan history that have been very controversial within the movement, exploring the connections Wicca has with Romantic poets and intellectuals, Freemasonry, the Rosicrucians, the Golden Dawn, cunning men and women, Crowley, Gardner, Valiente, feminism, the gay rights movement, and numerous other people and sets of ideas which have created and affected modern witchcraft. This book brings together so much. Please read it!

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It will give you all the details on how Wicca came to be created in the mid-twentieth century, based on literary, artistic, and academic fashions, the practices of fraternal orders and occult societies, old and new folk customs, and other cultural roots (real and imagined) going back to the 1700s. Hutton leaves no hope for those who wish to believe in a constantly existing Pagan religion in Britain or in a connection between the early modern witch trials and Paganism. No one can claim to be knowledgeable about the true history of modern Witchcraft who has not read and carefully studied this text.

This meticulously documented book pounds the final nails into the coffin of the claims Gardner made (and others inflated) that Wicca was an ancient surviving British Pagan religion of Witchcraft. None but the most stubbornly fundamentalist of Orthodox Wiccans can deny it any longer, though I'm sure they will continue to try, as a few of the negative reviews here demonstrate.

Hutton's work supports and amplifies the research into Wiccan history that I and other modern writers have done over the last thirty years. Indeed, the chapter in my new eBook ("Witchcraft: A Concise History") on Gerald Gardner and the birth of Wicca owes a great deal to his clear exposition of complex details.

Every Wiccan should have this book on their shelves.

I was so excited when I found this book! I hate to tell you how disappointed I was when I read it. Many positive reviews are posted here, so maybe I should try it again, but I'm not sure I have the patience.

Hutton debunks everything he presents; after a while it kind of got on my nerves. Virtually every description and explanation is followed by some sort of "but this probably didn't happen" or "this probably wasn't really the way it was" disclaimer. After reading several chapters, my attitude morphed into "why are you wasting my time telling me about stuff that didn't happen? Can't you tell me about anything that probably DID happen?" I (barely) finished it, feeling that I was left with anti-information as opposed to information.

"Debunking" popular notions is all well and good, but without offering any alternative ideas or explanations, this book could have been written in one sentence: "No concrete information is available so don't believe anything you read or hear about this subject."

Hope this great book comes back into print here. It's wordy, but I always appreciate the detail and background he provides. It's out of print here, it's still in print in the UK, so I got it from there.

This book is a great source for information about British customs and lore. Hutton is excited about his subject and holds it in deep regard all the wile telling us the way it really is. I learned a lot from this book and I consider it essential reading for everyone (especially neo-pagans) who has an interest in this subject.

As a neo-pagan I wouldn't want to have this vast subject explained to me in one sentence - I want examples as to why a certain custom or seasonal festival is important/necessary in the wheel of the year. Ialso want sources states because if someone were to just say to me "Everything you have read about British seasonal customs is wrong" I would say, "Prove it". Hutton indeed takes the time to prove his arguments.

Hutton isn't against neo-pagans, but he is _for_ scholarship.

No doubt about it, Ronald Hutton has undertaken a huge task in writing his book THE PAGAN RELIGIONS OF THE ANCIENT BRITISH ISLES. Hutton appears to be a well-read man who covered many sources of varying quality in the process of developing his text. He says he felt someone had to develop this synthesis, and his book is important, if for no other reason than it provides a "survey" of the material available in the early 1990s.

Hutton's book is filled with pages of information from a variety of sources and academic disciplines cobbled together in more or less chronological order and interspersed with passages of speculation. As he has criticized Sir James Frazier for taking a similar approach, I am puzzled. Frazier's ideas may be out of vogue with British anthropologists (archeolgists) as Hutton suggests, but they crossed the Atlantic and led to the formation of cultural anthropology in the States (whereas Taylor's ideas about social structure went the other way and led to the development of "sociology" in the U.K.).

Hutton refers to archeology as anthropology but in the States archeologists are historians (who tend to study the American Colonial period) or physical anthropologists who study North and South American prehistoric populations or classical archeologists working at sites in the Middle East -- all of them using different underlying approaches and world views.

With their time-consuming and tedious techniques archeologists have only begun to excavate the available remains in England or anywhere else. Hutton's own statistics point to thousands of sites to be explored in Britain alone. Who knows, maybe another Sutton Hoo awaits discovery. At any rate, one should be careful about forming opinions about the material record as it's early days. It took millions of years to create it, and archeology has been in existence less than 100 years. Since archeologists take the record apart with tooth brushes and strainers we won't have definitive answers in our lifetimes--if ever.

Hutton does not really look at the written record in any detail, or examine the rich mythology of the Irish. For example, Hutton covers passages from Gildas and Patrick in a few paragraphs where historians like Kenneth Dark have written whole books examining the use of Latin words by these writers who witnessed the "dark ages".

Revisionist historians sometimes seem to have persuaded themselves they can be objective where others have not, but this may not be true. As one researcher reverses another only to be reversed by some one else, we realize that all humans start with a world view, and that this view affects perception. Probably the most important contribution of this book is that like our ancestors (the ancient ones), we can believe what we want.

Many people do not think this book looks favorably on the Celtic pagan community, when in fact, Hutton thinks that there is a lot of magic to be found in the old tales and in paganism itself, however, good scholarship is important, too,

Many people also think that Hutton was tedious in mentioning so many facts that are similar in the same book, but I believe that this was to prove a point. Sure, you can discuss this in one sentence - "We don't know exactly what the ancinet pagans beleived and many of the alleged information we have about them is suspect". However, if asked to give proof and discuss sources, many people would be unable to do so.

This book is a wonderful study of practices of the ancient Celts by a neo-pagan author who has a lot of regard for his subject.

A fantastic, well-researched guide to the pre-Christian peoples of Britain, from Stone Age to Christian times. This book is especially good for Neo-Pagans, as it addresses many of the theories popular in Neo-Paganism (e.g., that the Green Man is an old Pagan deity, that Margaret Murray's Witch-Cult really existed, etc.) It's a wonderful antidote to much of the misinformation that gets promulgated in popular writings. The only drawback is that the book gets to be a bit depressing by the end. We know very little about Celtic religion and even less about the faith(s) of their Neolithic forebears. Hutton sticks scrupulously to the evidence, so he frequently ends up saying, "X is possible, but we don't really know for sure." More speculation would have spiced the book up -- but then again, more speculation would have made it a less reliable text, so maybe it's better the way it is!