Montague Summers

Augustus Montague Summers (10 April 1880 – 10 August 1948) was an English author, clergyman, and teacher. As an independent scholar, he published many works on the English drama of the Stuart Restoration (1660–1688) and helped to organise and to promote the performance of plays from that period. He also wrote extensively on the occult and has been characterized as "arguably the most seminal twentieth-century purveyor of pop culture occultism." Summers initially prepared for a career in the Church of England at Oxford and Lichfield, and was ordained as an Anglican deacon in 1908. He served briefly as a curate in Bitton, but he then converted to Roman Catholicism and began styling himself as a Catholic priest. He was never under the authority of any Catholic diocese or religious order in England, and it is doubtful that he was ever actually ordained to the priesthood. While employed as a teacher of English and Latin, he pursued scholarly work on the English theatre of the 17th century. For his contributions to that field he was elected to the Royal Society of Literature in 1916. Noted for his eccentric personality and interests, Summers became a popular figure in London high society first for his theatrical work and later for his History of Witchcraft and Demonology, published in 1926. That work was followed by other studies on witchcraft, vampires, and werewolves, in all of which he professed to believe. In 1928 he published his translation of the 15th-century witch hunter's manual, the Malleus Maleficarum, and for decades this remained the only full English translation of that historical document. Summers also produced scholarly work on Gothic fiction and published several anthologies of horror stories. He wrote some original works of fiction, but none of them were published in his lifetime.