Table of Contents

1: The Origins of Christmas
2: The Twelve Days
3: The Trials of Christmas
4: Rites of Celebration and Reassurance
5: Rites of Purification and Blessing
6: Rites of Hospitality and Charity
7: Mummers' Play and Sword Dance
8: Hobby-Horse and Hord Dance
9: Misrul
10: The Reinvention of Christmas
11: Speeding the Plough
12: Brigid's Night
13: Candlemas
14: Valentines
15: Shrovetide
16: Lent
17: The Origins of Easter
18: Holy Week
19: An Egg ad Easter
20: The Easter Holidays
21: England and St George
22: Beltane
23: The May
24: May Games and Whitsun Ales
25: Morris and Marian
26: Rogatide and Pentecost
27: Royal Oak
28: A Merrie May
29: Corpus Christi
30: The Midsummer Fires
31: Sheep, Hay, and Rushes
32: First Fruits
33: Harvest Home
34: Wakes, Revels, and Hoppings
35: Samhain
36: Saints and Souls
37: The Modern Hallowe'en
38: Blood Month and Virgin Queen
39: Gunpowder Treason
40: Conclusion

About the Author

Ronald Hutton is Reader in History at the University of Bristol.

Reviews

`a fascinating volume, which any future study of calendar rituals - or of 'pagan residues' in popular culture - will have to take into account.'
Margaret Cormack, Speculum - A Jnl of Medieval Studies, 2000.
`Students of religion will be impressed by the ample evidence the book provides, not for the survival of pagan religious practices in a Christian era, but for the survival of Catholic practices in a Protestant one.'
Margaret Cormack, Speculum - A Jnl of Medieval Studies, 2000.
`Well produced and written in a pleasing style, it is a rich source of information about late-medieval calendar customs whose scope extends far beyond the Middle Ages. Stations of the Sun belongs in the reference collection of any college library.'
Margaret Cormack, Speculum - A Jnl of Medieval Studies, 2000.
`a tour de force from one of the liveliest and most wide-ranging of practising English historians this unfailingly stimulating, learned and engaging book places a relatively neglected aspect of English social history firmly on the map.
'
Eamon Duffy, TLS