Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe

Queens of the Wild examines four goddess-like figures in European culture: Mother Earth, the Fairy Queen, the Mistress of the Night and the Cailleach, the powerful Old Woman of Gaelic tradition. Ronald Hutton follows their appearances in literature, folklore and learned thought from the medieval period to the present day, placing them alongside related ideas about hags, witches and the Green Man.

Drawing on anthropology, archaeology, history and literary evidence, Hutton questions the long-standing belief that these beings preserve fragments of an ancient pagan religion. He argues instead that they emerged in different cultural settings, outside both Christian theology and identifiable pre-Christian worship, while the idea of their pagan survival was shaped chiefly by 19th-century scholars.