Why have people believed in dragons, and what were they actually? Is there a difference between Western and Eastern dragons, in a global perspective, and if so, why?

Has the Western attitude to dragons changed in the modern era? Did Christianity give rise to a different idea of what a dragon should be? These are the questions that this lecture sets out to answer.

Professor Ronald Hutton
Professor of Divinity
Professor Hutton is Professor of History at the University of Bristol. He took degrees at Cambridge and then Oxford Universities, and was a fellow of 

 Magdalen College, Oxford. He is now a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Antiquaries and the Learned Society of Wales, and has won awards for teaching and research.

He has lectured all over the world, authored 18 books and 93 essays, appeared in or presented scores of television and radio programmes, and sits on the editorial boards of six journals concerned with the history of religion and magic.

He is currently working on the second volume of his biography of Oliver Cromwell.