Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe – An Investigation
Ronald Hutton
(YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 256 PP, 18.99)
Tablet bookshop price £17.09 • tel 020 7799 4064

What an extraordinary historian Ronald Hutton is. After his last triumph, a fine account of the early career of Oliver Cromwell, he has returned to his other stamping ground, medieval and early modern folk customs and ancient and medieval paganism and magic. Queens of the Wild, subtitled Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe, is almost the opposite of what readers might expect. You might be thinking of the shades of pagan antiquity resurfacing in Christian history, like a version of a creepy story by Algernon Blackwood. Well, you’d be wrong.

Quite how wrong is evident in the introduction, where Hutton documents the rise and fall of the idea that paganism survived in Europe well into the Christian era. The idea was given its fullest expression by the Egyptologist Margaret Murray, who, in 1921 and 1933, maintained from work on witch trials that the alleged witches were pagans, following “the cult of a horned god representing the generative powers of nature”, contrasted with “the gloom of Christianity”.