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Francis Young grew up in Bury St Edmunds, England, and holds a doctorate in history from the University of Cambridge. He has written over twenty books in the fields of folklore and the history of religion and supernatural belief, including Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic (2022), Magic in Merlin's Realm (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and Twilight of the Godlings (Cambridge University Press, 2023). His work has also appeared in History Today, BBC History Magazine and The Catholic Herald, as well as other periodicals. A regular podcaster, and broadcaster on BBC Radio, he is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a lay canon of St Edmundsbury Cathedral, and teaches courses in religious history and folklore for the Department for Continuing Education in the University of Oxford.
'Francis Young has carved out a justified reputation for accessible, scholarly research in areas such as the history of exorcism, fairies, and ecclesiastical history, as well as pagan studies. He wears his erudition with a light touch and has an excellent command of early-modern Latin manuscripts and texts. With his knowledge of Lithuania and Lithuanian, he is the ideal scholar to be writing on Baltic paganism. His book convincingly argues for the continuance of non-Christian religions in the Baltic and far North and supersedes previous work on the topic in its breadth and scholarship. There is a scholarly and general readership ready and waiting for new, innovative work on European paganisms. This is a welcome, up-to-date, and refreshing history of a thoroughly tantalizing subject.' Owen Davies, Professor of Social History, University of Hertfordshire, author of Art of the Grimoire: An Illustrated History of Magic Books and Spells (2023) 'Francis Young lifts the veil on a lost world of pre-Christian European religions in their final stages. A fascinating, moving and genuinely new exploration of the continent's religious history.' Tom Holland, author of Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (2019) 'Francis Young has established himself firmly over the past decade as an independent scholar of manifest ability, with a broad interest in what might be termed the wilder shores of the history of European religion: paganism, witchcraft, occultism and fairy belief. Moreover, he is one of the few British historians who knows anything about pre-Christian religion in Eastern Europe. His lucid and accessible prose provides the first comprehensive chronological story of the subject. He persuasively argues that that the process of Christianization, at least among the Baltic and Finno-Ugric peoples, was genuinely different from that in the rest of the continent. The result was that in these northern and north-eastern areas it started later than elsewhere and lasted a lot longer. This is not something that has been widely understood by Western historians hitherto.' Ronald Hutton, Professor of History, University of Bristol, author of Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe (2022)
