Month: April 2023

Late last night the Church of England released the Order of Service for the Coronation of King Charles III on 6 May, one week from today. The Coronation rite contains much that is old, but also a great deal that is new, and in the following document I have made a side-by-side comparison of the Coronation ordines in 1953 and 2023 which should make it clear what has changed, and what has stayed the same.

I am happy for anyone to make use of my comparative table, with appropriate acknowledgement, in order to interpret the forthcoming Coronation.

This afternoon I spoke briefly to Edward Stourton on BBC Radio 4’s World at One programme about the history and significance of the Coronation regalia. You can listen to this segment of the programme here, at time signature 39:00.

My book Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic, published by Arc Humanities Press in 2022, is now available as a paperback (priced at just £24.95 in the UK), which will hopefully increase access to the book and enhance knowledge of pre-Christian Baltic religion in the English-speaking world. The book won the 2021 Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies Book Subvention Award, was shortlisted for the 2022 Katharine Briggs Folklore Award, and has been described by Dr Eglė Aleknaitė as ‘A significant contribution … a timely invitation to see Baltic paganism, its interpretations, and interpreters in a wider European and even global context and to critically assess popular assumptions about the exceptional survival of Baltic paganism.’

The audiobook version of Magic in Merlin’s Realm, read by Peter Noble, has been released by RBmedia. The audiobook is available via Audible here.

This evening I launched my new book Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Origins of Britain’s Supernatural Beings at the Cambridge University Press Bookshop in Cambridge, which pulled out all the stops for the occasion including dedicating a whole window of the bookshop to the book. It was great to see people at the launch reception who had come from as far afield as the USA. Alex Wright of Cambridge University Press said a few words to introduce me and I then briefly introduced the book, explaining that it is the first to tackle seriously the question of the origin of Britain’s fairies in around sixty years. I then signed books for those present as well as a number of additional copies for the bookshop.

You can order Twilight of the Godlings here with free postage within the UK, and at a 20% discount using the code YOUNG2023. Signed copies are now available!

My article ‘Strange Journeys’, about the weirder side of medieval pilgrimages, has just appeared in issue 9 of Hellebore magazine. You can order a copy of the zine here.