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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 Popular 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 then converted to Catholic Church and began styling himself as a Catholic priest. He was, however, 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, , and werewolf, 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witch hunter's manual, the Malleus Maleficarum, and for decades this remained the only full English translation of that historical document.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 fiction. He wrote some original works of fiction, none of which were published in his lifetime.
In 1899, Summers matriculated at Trinity College, Oxford. Although an avid reader and linguist, Summers neglected his university studies. In 1904 he received a fourth-class Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in theology, promoted in 1906 to a Master of Arts (MA) degree, as per the custom of the University of Oxford. Summers continued his religious training at Lichfield Theological College with the intention of becoming a priest in the Church of England.
Summers self-published his first book, Antinous and Other Poems, in 1907. Its contents reflected the influence of the literary Decadent movement while showcasing Summers's own preoccupations with pederasty, Middle Ages, Catholic liturgy, and the occult. Summers dedicated that book to the writer Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen, who was notorious for having been convicted years earlier by a court in Paris of "inciting minors to debauchery".
Summers was ordained as deacon in 1908 by George Forrest Browne, the Bishop of Bristol. He was then appointed as curate in Bitton, near Bristol. The vicar of Bitton was the elderly Canon Ellacombe, who could provide Summers with little supervision or guidance. When a friend from Oxford, the poet J. Redwood Anderson, visited Summers at the Bitton vicarage, he found Summers "in a thoroughly neurotic state and exhibiting a morbid fascination with evil". Summers's brief curacy ended under a cloud and he never proceeded to higher orders in the Anglican Church, apparently because of rumours of his interest in Satanism and allegations of sexual impropriety with young boys.
Summers's interest in Satanism probably derived in part from his reading of the works of the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, particularly the novel Là-bas (1891), which includes an account of a Black Mass. Summers himself later claimed in private conversation to have attended Black Masses in Bruges, Brighton, and London. (2025). 9781786331816, Hutchinson. ISBN 9781786331816 Some of his former associates, including Redwood Anderson, claim that in his early years Summers conducted such ceremonies himself.
According to the testimonies quoted by Gerard P. O'Sullivan, Summers and another clergyman, the Rev. Austin Nelson, were accused in 1908 of attempting to seduce a choirboy in Bath. Fearing that the police might question him, Summers fled to Antwerp, in Belgium. Summers was not prosecuted and he returned to England soon thereafter.Gerard P. O'Sullivan, "Prologue: The Continuing Quest for Montague Summers," in Montague Summers, The Vampire: His Kith and King – A Critical Edition, ed. John Edgar Browning (Berkeley, CA: Apocryphile Press, 2011), pp. xxviii- lxxii
According to some testimonies, Summers had transferred from the seminary in Wornesh to the Diocese of Nottingham, but the local bishop refused to ordain him after receiving incriminating reports of Summers's prior conduct. Some sources claim that Summers then travelled to Continental Europe and was ordained by Cardinal Mercier in Belgium or by Archbishop Guido Maria Conforti in Italy. It is also alleged that Summers was ordained as a priest by Ulric Vernon Herford, the self-styled "Bishop of Mercia and Middlesex" in the "Evangelical Catholic Communion", one of several Episcopus vagans ("wandering bishops") operating in Britain at the time.
Brocard Sewell argued that "there is a strong probability, if not a moral certainty" that Summers had been validly but perhaps illicitly ordained as a priest. Sewell gave as evidence the facts that Summers was allowed to say mass publicly when he travelled in the Continent and that Monsignor Ronald Knox, although wholly unsympathetic and opposed to Summers, regarded him as actually being a Catholic priest.
With the Nonesuch Press, Summers published critical editions of the collected plays of William Congreve (1923), William Wycherley (1924), and Thomas Otway (1926). With Reginald Caton's Fortune Press, Summers edited the works of Thomas Shadwell (1927). In 1931-32 there appeared his edition of the works of John Dryden, published by Nonesuch, which attracted considerable criticism from other scholars for what they identified as faulty editing of the texts and unacknowledged borrowing from other scholars in the notes. After that, Summers published no other critical editions of dramatists.
Several decades after his death, literary critic and historian Robert D. Hume characterized Montague Summers's scholarship on Restoration drama as pioneering and useful, but also as marred by sloppiness, eccentricity, uncritical deference to Edmund Gosse and other similar gentlemen-amateurs, and even occasional dishonesty. Hume judged Summers's studies on The Restoration Theatre (1934) and The Playhouse of Samuel Pepys (1935) to be particularly fruitful sources. In his own day, Summers's credibility among university-based scholars was adversely impacted by the acrimonious public disputes in which he engaged with others working in the same field, such as Frederick S. Boas and Allardyce Nicoll.
Gothic fiction became the other focus of Summers's literary scholarship, in addition to Restoration drama. In 1938, Summers published a history of the Gothic novel titled The Gothic Quest, which was later praised by the French scholar André Parreaux as "a unique and valuable book, indispensable to the student of the period". A second volume of that history, to be titled The Gothic Achievement, had not been completed when Summers died in 1948. Summers's Gothic Bibliography, published in 1940, has been characterized as "flawed but useful."
Summers also compiled three anthologies of supernatural stories: The Supernatural Omnibus (1931), Victorian Ghost Stories (1933), and The Grimoire and other Supernatural Stories (1936). On the strength of that work, he has been described as "the major anthologist of supernatural and Gothic fiction" in the 1930s.
The basic tenet of Summers's approach to witchcraft was Thomas Stapleton's dictum Crescit cum magia haeresis, cum haeresi magia ("Heresy grows with witchcraft, and witchcraft with heresy"). Summers presented modern spiritualism as a continuation of older forms of witchcraft and necromancy.
Summers expressed belief in the existence of , their role in possession and exorcism, and other preternatural phenomena associated with their activity. However, he also argued, based on the theological views of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, that the magical rites of witches can do no real harm to others. He considered that the testimonies according to which witches reached the place of their "sabbath" by magical flight were based on some delusion and argued that the "devil" reported to appear at such gatherings was an ordinary man in disguise, engaged in a burlesque of the ritual of the holy mass.
The History of Witchcraft and Demonology sold well and attracted considerable attention in the press, with several reviewers expressing surprise that a 20th-century scholar had written as if the persons accused during the historical had really been guilty of the crimes attributed to them. The book's success made Summers "something of a social celebrity" and allowed him to give up teaching and write full time. In 1927 Summers published a companion volume, The Geography of Witchcraft, also as part of Ogden's "History of Civilization" series.
In 1928, Summers published the first full English translation of the Malleus Maleficarum ("The Hammer of Witches"), a Latin manual on the detection and prosecution of witches written in the 15th century by the Dominican Order inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger. 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.Jolly, Raudvere, & Peters(eds.), "Witchcraft and magic in Europe: the Middle Ages", page 241 (2002). Other Catholic scholars contemporary with Summers were 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."
After his first works on witchcraft were published, Summers turned his attention to vampires, producing The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928) and The Vampire in Europe (1929). According to Summers's books, his research on vampires was not exclusively bibliographical, but also drew on oral traditions that he had encountered during his travels in Greece. Summers then turned to Werewolf with The Werewolf (1933).
In 1933, copies of Summers's 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 defence of the scholarly value of the works in question. The publisher, Reginald Caton, was convicted and the unsold copies destroyed.
According to Horror fiction scholar John Edgar Browning, "it is because of Summers that the modern serious study of the vampire figure exists today". On the other hand, Browning also finds that, for all their erudition, Summers's research on the occult exhibits "a curious absence of any real depth", which may explain why "a stigma has been attached to Summers's writings for almost as long as they have been in print." After Christopher S. MacKay published a full translation of the Malleus Maleficarum in 2006, historian Jonathan Seitz welcomed that new work, noting that, until then, the Malleus had "been readily available in English only in the atrocious 1928 'translation' authored by Montague Summers". Seitz added that "to dub Summers an eccentric would be to understate substantially his outsized personality, and his edition reflects his idiosyncrasies."
The prominent Catholic historian Jeffrey Burton Russell, a specialist in the religion of the European Middle Ages, wrote in 1972 that
According to Brian Doherty, Summers's later writings on witchcraft, published in the 1930s and 1940s, "adopted a far more paranoid and conspiracy-driven worldview" than his earlier works 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, Doherty argues that Summers's work may have influenced the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s and 1990s.
Summers wrote works of hagiography on Catherine of Siena, Anthony Maria Zaccaria, and other Catholic saints, but his primary religious interest was always in the occult. While Aleister Crowley, with whom he was acquainted and whose career he followed closely, adopted the persona of a modern-day sorcerer, Summers played the part of a learned Catholic witch-hunter. Despite his conservative religiosity, Summers was an active member of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology (BSSSP), to which he contributed an essay on the Marquis de Sade in 1920. Summers also appears to have been a member of the Order of Chaeronea, a secret society of homosexual men that was established by George Cecil Ives, another member of the BSSSP, and which was active between the 1890s and the 1920s.
In 1926, Summers advertised in the London The Times for a secretary to assist him with his literary work. A young Cyril Connolly responded, but found Summers uncongenial and turned down the position. Connolly privately mocked Summers in blank verse as "a sorcerer / a fruity unfrocked cleric of the Nineties / Like an old toad that carries in his head / The jewel of literature, a puffy satyr / That blends his Catholic liturgy with the filth / Scrawled on Roman graffiti."Jeremy Lewis, Cyril Connolly: A Life (Jonathan Cape, 1997), p. 143
The posthumously published personal diaries of socialite and later Conservative politician Sir Henry Channon relate how Channon first met Summers at a dinner party in Summers's honour given by Maud Cunard in January 1928. Channon's diaries then relate a series of visits to Summers's home in Richmond. Channon recounts that, on more than one occasion and at Channon's suggestion, Summers took Channon upstairs to his private chapel after dinner and beat him over the altar. Channon characterized Summers as a "lecherous priest", "a madman", and "as dangerous as he is brilliant", cutting off contact with him after a couple of months.
Summers lived in Oxford from 1929 to 1934, where he often worked at the Bodleian Library and attended Solemn Mass at Blackfriars. He collaborated with a number of student dramatic productions and became the object of much attention and gossip among Oxford University undergraduates, who regarded him as "a kind of clerical Faust".
The popular novelist Dennis Wheatley relates that he was introduced to Summers by the journalist and politician Tom Driberg while Wheatley was researching occultism for his novel The Devil Rides Out (1934). A weekend visit by Wheatley and his wife to Summers's home in Alresford was cut short by the Wheatleys, who determined "never to see the, perhaps not so Reverend, gentleman again". Summers and Wheatley continued to correspond on friendly terms, but Wheatley reportedly based the character of the evil Canon Copely-Syle, in his novel To the Devil – a Daughter (1953), on Montague Summers.
According to Fr. Brocard Sewell, Summers was the only English member of the Société J.-K. Huysmans of Paris, which was dedicated to the legacy of the French novelist and critic Joris-Karl Huysmans. In 1943, the Fortune Press published an English translation of Huysmans's novel Là-bas, edited and annotated by Summers.
Summers wrote several original works of fiction, but none of these were published during his lifetime. The unpublished manuscripts include two plays: William Henry: A Play in Four Acts and Piers Gaveston (whose text is now lost and whose title is sometimes listed as Edward II). A number of ghost stories and a short novel, The Bride of Christ, were found among Summers's papers and published long after his death.
Father Thurston also called attention to the fact that Summers did not figure in any English register as either an Anglican or a Catholic priest, but was instead a literary figure with distinctly Decadent tastes. According to Bernard Doherty, Thurston may have been concerned that Summers's writings on witchcraft could have been a "mystification" akin to the Taxil hoax of the 1890s, intended to bring ridicule upon the Catholic Church. Thurston publicly challenged Summers to show that he was really an ordained priest, which Summers failed to do. Bernard Doherty notes that, although Summers's belief in the preternatural reality of witchcraft was at odds with the skepticism of Fr. Thurston and other Catholic commentators, it was closer to the views expressed by some prominent English Catholic intellectuals of his day, such as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.
According to Fr. Brocard Sewell, Summers was well known but also generally mal vu among English Dominican Order in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1938 both Mons. Ronald Knox and Douglas Woodruff objected to having their own essays published in a collection on Great Catholics edited by Fr. Claude Williamson, after they learned that the book would also include an essay by Summers on John Dryden. Shortly after Summers's death in 1948, the Catholic Herald published a statement by the Diocese of Southwark to the effect that Summers had, many years earlier, been a student for the priesthood but that, as far as was known, he had not been ordained. Fr. Sewell, although convinced that Summers had been a priest, declared that his "clerical life seems to have had more in common with the strange semi-fantasy world of the Episcopus vagans than with that of a normal priest."
In the early 1930s, Summers acted as a private chaplain to Mrs. Ermengarde Greville-Nugent, the widow of Patrick Greville-Nugent, son of Anglo-Irish aristocrat and politician Lord Greville. Mrs. Greville-Nugent was a prominent neo-Jacobite and founder of the Anglican Society of King Charles the Martyr before her conversion to Roman Catholicism. Both her only daughter and her husband had died insane, and she was convicted of fraud in 1934 for obtaining money to keep up her elegant lifestyle by writing deceptive begging letters to people whose names had appeared in the newspapers as recent beneficiaries of wills. The Catholic Bishop of Southwark, Peter Amigo, Excommunication Mrs. Greville-Nugent for allowing Summers to celebrate mass in the private oratory at Kingsley Dene, her home in Dulwich.
Summers bequeathed his estate and papers to his long-time personal secretary and companion Hector Stuart-Forbes. This legacy was valued at £10,000 (the equivalent of about £300,000 in 2024), but Stuart-Forbes was already seriously ill and died in 1950, aged 45, and was buried in the same unmarked plot as Summers. An autobiography of Summers was published posthumously in 1980 as The Galanty Show, but it left much unrevealed about the author's life and dealt only with the literary side of his career. In the 2000s, many of Summers's personal papers were re-discovered in Canada, where they had been kept by members of Stuart-Forbes's family. A collection of Summers's papers is now at the Georgetown University library.
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