Upon initial publication, Murray's thesis gained a favourable reception from many readers, including a number of significant scholars, albeit none of whom were experts in the witch trials. Historians of Early Modern Britain like Sir George Clark and Christopher Hill incorporated her theories into their work, although Hill later publicly regretted doing so. For the 1961 reprint of The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, Medieval historian Steven Runciman provided a foreword in which he accepted that some of Murray's minor details may be open to criticism, but in which he was otherwise supportive of her thesis. Her theories were recapitulated by Pennethorne Hughes in his 1952 book Witches. It was also adopted and championed by the archaeologist T. C. Lethbridge, marking his increasing estrangement from mainstream academia; in turn, Murray publicly defended his controversial theories regarding the chalk hill figures of Wandlebury Hill in the Gog Magog Hills, Cambridgeshire. As a result, a commentator writing in 1962 could comment that the Murrayite interpretations of the witch trials seem to hold, at the time of writing, an almost undisputed sway at the higher intellectual levels, being widely accepted among educated people.