It was released as a part of a series of academic books entitled 'Studies in the Dynamics of Persecution and Extermination' that were funded by the Columbus Centre and edited by Cohn himself.

[citation needed] In 1966, the University of Sussex in Southern England set up a research centre to investigate the contexts under which the persecution and extermination of different groups of people came about.

Multidisciplinary in nature, the Centre went on to publish a series of books on various different persecutions throughout history, from the rise of European nationalism to the Holocaust and apartheid in South Africa.

[1] In 1957, Cohn had published a book entitled The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, which saw a revised and expanded edition in 1970.

It argues that the stereotype of the witch, as it existed in many parts of Europe in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is made up of elements of diverse origins, and that some of these derived from a specific fantasy which can be traced back to Antiquity."