Montague Summers

Augustus Montague Summers (10 April 1880 – 10 August 1948) was an English author and self-styled clergyman. He is known primarily for his scholarly work on the English drama of the 17th century, as well as for his idiosyncratic studies on witchcraft, vampires, and werewolves, in all of which he professed to believe. He was responsible for the first English translation, published in 1928, of the 15th-century witch hunter's manual, the "Malleus Maleficarum".
Early life.
Montague Summers was the youngest of the seven children of Augustus William Summers, a rich 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 priest in the Church of England. In 1905, he received a fourth-class Bachelor of Arts degree. He then continued his religious training at Lichfield Theological College.
Summers was ordained as deacon in 1908 and worked as a curate in Bath and Bitton, in Greater Bristol. He never proceeded to higher orders, however, probably because of rumours of his interest in Satanism and accusations of sexual impropriety with young boys, for which he was tried and acquitted. Summers' first book, "Antinous and Other Poems", published in 1907, was dedicated to the subject of pederasty.
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 presenting himself 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. Whether he was ever actually ordained as a priest is disputed.
Literary scholarship.
Summers worked for several years as an English and Latin teacher at schools such as Brockley County School in south-east London, before adopting writing as his full-time employment. He was interested in the theatre of the seventeenth century, particularly of the English Restoration, editing the plays of Aphra Behn, John Dryden, and William Congreve, among others. He was a founding members of The Phoenix, a society that performed those neglected works, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1916.
Montague Summers also produced important studies of the Gothic fiction genre. He edited three collections of Gothic horror short stories, as well as 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 writer of Gothic fiction.
Summers compiled three anthologies of supernatural stories, "The Supernatural Omnibus", "The Grimoire and other Supernatural Stories", and "Victorian Ghost Stories". Summers has been described as "the major anthologist of supernatural and Gothic fiction" in the 1930s.
The occult.
Summers' career as an ostensibly Catholic clergyman was highly unusual. Although he wrote works of hagiography on Catherine of Siena and Anthony Maria Zaccaria, his primary religious interest was in the subject of the occult. While Aleister Crowley, with whom he was acquainted, adopted the persona of a modern-day witch, Summers played the part of the learned Catholic witch-hunter. In the introduction to his book on "The History of Witchcraft and Demonology" (1926) he writes:
In 1928, he published the first English translation of Heinrich Kramer's "Malleus Maleficarum" ("The Hammer of Witches"), a 15th-century Latin manual on the hunting of 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 had 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."
Montague 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.
Other pursuits.
Summers cultivated his reputation for eccentricity. "The Times" wrote he was "in every way a 'character' and in some sort a throwback to the Middle Ages." His biographer, Father Brocard Sewell (writing under the pseudonym "Joseph Jerome"), paints the following portrait of Summers:
Despite his conservative religiosity, Summers was an active member of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, to which he contributed an essay on the Marquis de Sade.
Death.
Montague Summers died at his home in Richmond, Surrey in August 1948. An autobiography "The Galanty Show" was published posthumously in 1980, though much is left unrevealed about his life. His grave in Richmond Cemetery was unmarked until the late 1980s, when Sandy Robertson and Edwin Pouncey organised the Summers Project to garner donations for a gravestone. It now bears his favoured phrase "tell me strange things". Summers's manservant Hector Stuart-Forbes is buried in the same plot.