Discover the Best Books Written by Montague Summers

Augustus Montague Summers was an English author, clergyman, and teacher. He initially prepared for a career in the Church of England at Oxford and Lichfield and was ordained as an Anglican deacon in 1908. He then converted to Roman Catholicism and began styling himself as a Catholic priest. He was, however, never affiliated with any Catholic diocese or religious order, and it is doubtful that he was ever actually ordained to the priesthood. Instead, he was employed as a teacher of English and Latin while independently pursuing scholarly work on the English drama of the 17th century. The latter earned him the Royal Society of Literature election in 1916.

Noted for his eccentric personality and interests, Summers became a well-known figure in London due to his History of Witchcraft and Demonology publication in 1926. That work was followed by other studies on witchcraft, vampires, and werewolves, which he professed to believe. Summers also produced a modern English translation, published in 1929, of the 15th-century witch hunter's manual, the Malleus Maleficarum. He has been characterized as "arguably the most seminal twentieth-century purveyor of pop culture occultism."

From 1911 to 1926, Summers found employment as an English and Latin teacher at several schools, including Brockley County School in southeast London. With the encouragement of Arthur Henry Bullen of the Shakespeare Head Press, Summers successfully established himself as a scholarly authority on the theatre of the Stuart Restoration.

Summers successively edited the plays of Aphra Behn, William Congreve, William Wycherley, Thomas Otway, Thomas Shadwell, and John Dryden. He also helped to create a new society called "The Phoenix" that performed those neglected works. Summers' work on Restoration drama earned him an election as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1916.

Several decades after his death, Robert D. Hume characterized Montague Summers' scholarship on Restoration drama as pioneering and useful but also marred by sloppiness, eccentricity, uncritical deference to Sir Edmund Gosse and other similar gentlemen-amateurs, and even occasional dishonesty. Hume judged Summers' studies on The Restoration Theatre (1934) and The Playhouse of Pepys (1935) to be particularly fruitful sources. In his day, Summers' credibility among university-affiliated scholars was adversely impacted by the acrimonious disputes in which he engaged with others working in the same field.

The other primary focus of Summers' literary scholarship was Gothic fiction. He edited three collections of Gothic horror short stories and an incomplete edition of two of the seven obscure Gothic novels, known as the "Northanger Horrid Novels," that Jane Austen mentioned in her Gothic parody novel Northanger Abbey. He was instrumental in rediscovering those lost works, which some had supposed were inventions of Jane Austen herself. He also published biographies of Austen and Ann Radcliffe, a Gothic fiction writer. Summers' Gothic Bibliography, published in 1940, has been characterized as "flawed but useful."

Summers compiled three anthologies of supernatural stories, The Supernatural Omnibus, The Grimoire and other Supernatural Stories, and Victorian Ghost Stories. He was described as "the major anthologist of supernatural and Gothic fiction" in the 1930s.

He also edited the poetry of Richard Barnfield, a contemporary of Shakespeare. Summers' introduction to his 1936 edition of Barnfield's poems stressed the homosexual theme of some of those works, particularly The Affectionate Shepherd.

From 1916 onwards, Summers regularly published articles in popular occult periodicals, including The Occult Review and the Spiritualist periodical Light. In 1926 his work on The History of Witchcraft and Demonology appeared as part of the series on "History of Civilization" published by Kegan Paul and edited by C. K. Ogden. The book sold well and attracted considerable attention in the press. That success made Summers "something of a social celebrity" and allowed him to give up teaching and to write full-time. In 1927 a companion volume, The Geography of Witchcraft, also appeared in Ogden's "History of Civilization" series.

In 1928, Summers published the first English translation of Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum ("The Hammer of Witches"), a 15th-century Latin manual on hunting witches. In his introduction, Summers insists that the reality of witchcraft is an essential part of Catholic doctrine and declares the Malleus an admirable and correct account of witchcraft and of the methods necessary to combat it.

In fact, however, the Catholic authorities of the 15th century condemned the Malleus on both ethical and legal grounds. Other Catholic scholars contemporary with Summers were also highly critical of the Malleus. For instance, the Rev. Herbert Thurston's article on "Witchcraft" for the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1912 refers to the publication of the Malleus as a "disastrous episode."

Summers then turned to vampires, producing The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928) and The Vampire in Europe (1929), and later to werewolves with The Werewolf (1933). Summers' work on the occult is notorious for his unusual and old-fashioned writing style, his display of erudition, and his purported belief in the reality of the subjects he treats.

In 1933, copies of Summers' translations of The Confessions of Madeleine Bavent and of Ludovico Maria Sinistrari's Demoniality were seized by the police due to their explicit accounts of sexual intercourse between humans and demons. At the ensuing trial of the publisher for obscene libel, anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard testified in defense of the scholarly value of the works in question. The publisher, Reginald Caton, was convicted, and the unsold copies were destroyed.

According to Brian Doherty, Summers' later work on witchcraft, published in the 1930s and 1940s, "adopted a far more paranoid and conspiracy-driven worldview" than his earlier writings on the subject. These later writings draw extensively from earlier conspiracy theorists such as the French counter-revolutionary Abbé Augustin Barruel and the English Fascist Nesta Helen Webster. As such, Summers' work may have influenced the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s and 1990s.