Reviews of the book published in specialist academic journals were mixed, with some scholars supporting and others rejecting Wilby's theory, although all noted the importance of such a work for witchcraft studies.
"[2] "Historians such as Carlo Ginzburg, Gabór Klaniczay and Éva Pócs have argued that descriptions of sabbath experiences and familiar-encounters found in early modern European witch trials were expressions of popular experiential traditions rooted in pre-Christian shamanistic beliefs and practices.
"[6] After laying out the basis of her argument in the book's introduction,[7] Wilby starts by giving a context for the world of Early Modern Britain, which was for the common people an unceasingly poor and traumatic place, filled with folk beliefs about magic, religion, animism, and fairies of both Christian and pre-Christian origin.
[14] The second part of the book proceeds to lay out the case that the encounters with familiar spirits recorded by those investigating cunning folk and alleged witches did not simply reflect "accumulations of folk belief" but that instead they offer real "descriptions of visionary experiences - actual psychic events which occurred in historical time and geographical space" which "could be interpreted as evidence that popular shamanistic visionary traditions, of pre-Christian origin, survived in many parts of Britain during the early modern period.
[18] The third and final part of Wilby's study deals with what she describes as "the possible spiritual significance of these traditions,"[15] which includes the argument that these encounters with familiars were actually mystical experiences.
She reviews the ways that scholars have looked at the ontology of familiar encounters, which often include the belief that they were partly or wholly fiction, as opposed to the contemporary writings that treated them as real events.
[21] Learned magicians of the period who practiced "high magic" have been recognized as having mystical experiences, so Wilby provides some reasons that scholars may have treated common magic practitioners differently: these practitioners were illiterate and therefore never recorded their experiences, they were intimidated by crowded courtrooms during witch trials, they sometimes used methods of deception that our culture would term quackery, they didn't conform to today's preconceptions of mysticism that we inherited from Christianity, and there was a large gulf between the way they experienced the world versus scholars of today—the last point being elucidated by Ananda Coomaraswamy's claim that our society suffers from "imaginal illiteracy" which prevents our mind from forming images in the same was as illiterate peoples.
[22] Wilby draws parallels between the cunning folk and witches to Christian contemplatives whose status as mystics is taken as historical fact, including Margery Kempe, Walter Hilton, Teresa of Ávila, Bridget of Sweden, Hadewijch, and Christina Ebner.
"Emma Wilby's views challenge those of other current historians, notably Owen Davies, who sees cunning folk as far more pragmatic and down-to-earth, and Diane Purkiss, who interprets the encounters of witches with fairies as compensatory psychological fantasies.
Both of these scholars' works sensitively walk a line between the traditional (and flawed) concept of academic objectivity and the (laudably acknowledged) human subjectivity that inevitably will and certainly should connect the author with his or her theme."
Writing in the journal Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, the historian Marion Gibson of the University of Exeter was more positive, calling Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits "bold, yet careful and intellectually rigorous", praising Wilby's inclusion of Bessie Dunlop's original trial records and ultimately relating that "This is by far the most persuasive account of such a [mystic] "tradition" that I have read.
Believing that "[n]obody had done anything like this before", Hutton did however admit to some criticisms, relating that "I think some of her suggestions more speculative than others, and (as she knows) I worry a bit about her selective use of widely scattered examples of what can be called shamanism taken from other parts of the world.