From the 1930s onward, various historians studying the witch trials on continental Europe had begun arguing that in some areas, the image of the witch had been influenced by underlying local folklore about visionary journeys. Poc's book on Hungarian witchcraft and magic appeared in her native language in 1997, before being published in an English translation in 1999 as "Between the Living and the Dead". At the time of writing, Wilby had done some part-time teaching at Exeter University, although was essentially performing the research in her capacity as an independent scholar. Wilby's unpublished work came to the attention of the historian Ronald Hutton of Bristol University, a specialist in Early Modern Britain, who would later note that he "gave it all the help that I could, in making suggestions for improvement to the manuscript, encouraging a publisher, and writing an endorsement", believing that Wilby had "repaid my faith richly with the result." Wilby opens her book with a transcript from the trial of the cunning woman Bessie Dunlop, which took place in Edinburgh in 1576, in the midst of the Early Modern witch trials. Dunlop had been accused of "Sorcery, Witchcraft and Incantation, with Invocation of spirits of the devil", found guilty, and executed through strangulation. The first part of "Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits" is devoted to a historical examination of the professional cunning folk and accused witches of Early Modern Britain, with a particular focus on the beliefs in familiar spirits that they held to; according to Wilby, this serves the purpose of "illustrat[ing] in some detail, the event-pattern, emotional dynamics, and social context of the alleged familiar-encounter, and secondly to illustrate how encounter-narratives were not merely élite fictions, that is, the result of learned prosecutors superimposing their demonological preconceptions onto cunning folk and witches, but were rooted in folk belief and came, in significant part, from the magical practitioners themselves." After laying out the basis of her argument in the book's introduction, 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. For the sake of discussion, she simplifies the various contemporary terms for folk magic practitioners into two types: cunning folk, who generally perform beneficial magic, and witches, who generally perform harmful magic, also known as maleficium, and she explains the types of services each typically provided, often for others in exchange for goods or services.