Augustus Montague Summers (10 April, 1880 - 10 August, 1948) was an eccentric British author and clergyman. He is known primarily for his 1928 English translation of the medieval witch hunter's manual, the Malleus Maleficarum, as well as for several studies on witches, vampires, and werewolves, in all of which he professed to believe.
Life
Montague Summers was the youngest of the seven children of Augustus William Summers, an affluent banker and justice of the peace in Clifton, Bristol. Summers was educated at Clifton College before studying theology at Trinity College, Oxford with the intention of becoming a curate in the Church of England. He continued his religious training at Lichfield Theological College and became a deacon in 1908, but he apparently never proceeded to higher orders, probably because of accusations of sexual impropriety with young boys. Summers was for a while part of the circle of the so-called "Uranian poets," who celebrated ancient Greco-Roman pederasty. His first book, Antinous and Other Poems appeared in 1907 and was dedicated to this subject matter.
Summers worked for several years as an English and Latin teacher at various schools before adopting writing as his full-time employment. He was interested in the theater of the seventeenth century, particularly that of the English Restoration, and edited the plays of Aphra Behn, John Dryden, William Congreve, among others. He also established a society that performed those neglected works, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1916.
Summers also joined the growing ranks of English men of letters interested in medievalism, Catholicism, and the occult. In 1909 he converted to Catholicism and shortly thereafter he began passing himself off as a Catholic priest and styling himself the "Reverend Alphonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague Summers", even though he was never a member of any Catholic order or diocese. It is possible that Summers may have been secretly ordained by a bishop of the Old Catholic Church, though there is no evidence to support this.
Summers wrote hagiography (on Saint Catherine of Siena) and lives of writers such as Jane Austen before turning to the occult, for which he is best remembered. In 1928 he published the first English translation of Heinrich Kramer's and James Sprenger's Malleus Maleficarum ("The Hammer of Witchcraft"), a fifteenth century Latin text on the hunting of witches. This work followed his History of Witchcraft and Demonology (1927) and The Geography of Witchcraft (1928). He 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's 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. Considered of little value by most mainstream scholars, several of his books have remained popular among certain enthusiasts of the occult.
Summers cultivated his reputation for eccentricity. The Times of London wrote he was "in every way a 'character' and in some sort a throwback to the Middle Ages." His biographer, Brocard Sewell , paints the following portrait of Summers: "During the year 1927, the striking and somber figure of the Reverend Montague Sommers in black soutane and cloak, with buckled shoes--a la Louis Quatorze--and shovel hat could often haven been seen entering or leaving the reading room of the British Museum, carrying a large black portfolio bearing on its side a white label, showing in blood-red capitals, the legend 'VAMPIRES'."
While his friend Aleister Crowley adopted the persona of a modern-day witch, Summers played the part of the learned Catholic witch-hunter. His introduction to the Malleus Maleficarum declares it an admirable and correct account of witchcraft and of the methods necessary to combat it. In the introduction to his book on The History of Witchcraft and Demonology he writes: "In the following pages I have endeavored to show the witch as she really was – an evil liver: a social pest and parasite: the devotee of a loathly and obscene creed: an adept at poisoning, blackmail, and other creeping crimes: a member of a powerful secret organization inimical to Church and State: a blasphemer in word and deed, swaying the villagers by terror and superstition: a charlatan and a quack sometimes: a bawd: an abortionist: the dark counselor of lewd court ladies and adulterous gallants: a minister to vice and inconceivable corruption, battening upon the filth and foulest passions of the age".
He died at his home in Richmond, Surrey.
Works
Among his works are:
Poetry and Drama
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Antinous and Other Poems, 1907
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William Henry (play), 1939
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Edward II (play), 1940
Prose fiction
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Horrid Mysteries, 1927
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The Grimoire and Other Ghostly Tales, 1936
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Six Ghost Stories, 1937
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The Sins of the Fathers, 1947
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Supernatural Tales, 1947
Edition and translation
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Works of Mrs. Aphra Behn, 1915
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Complete Works of Congreve, 1923
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Complete Works of Wycherley, 1924
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The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, 1927
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Covent Garden Drollery, 1927
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Sinistrati 's Demoniality, 1927
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The Compendium Maleficorum of Francesco Guazzo , 1929
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Victorian Ghost Stories, 1933
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The Complete Works of Otway, 1936
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Supernatural Omnibus, 1935
The occult
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The History of Witchcraft, 1926
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The Geography of Witchcraft, 1927
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The Necromancer of the Black Forest, 1927
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The Discovery of Witchcraft, 1928
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The Vampire, His Kith and Kin, 1928
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The Vampire in Europe, 1929
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The Werewolf, 1933
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Witchcraft and Black Magic, 1946
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The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism, 1947.
Other Works
Bibliography
- Brocard Sewell (aka Joseph Jerome). Montague Summers: A Memoir. London: Cecil and Amelia Woolf, 1965.
Links
A biography with photos http://www.unicorngarden.com/vamp01.htm
Last updated: 02-07-2005 12:33:33
Last updated: 05-03-2005 17:50:55
