Montague Summers
Augustus Montague Summers was an English author, clergyman, and teacher. As an independent scholar, he published many works on the English drama of the Stuart Restoration 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 then converted to Roman Catholicism 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, 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witch hunter's manual, the Malleus Maleficarum, and for decades this remained the only full English translation of that historical document.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, none of which were published in his lifetime.
Early life
Montague Summers was the youngest of the seven children of Augustus William Summers, a wealthy businessman and justice of the peace in Clifton, Bristol, and his wife Ellen née Bush. Augustus was a director of Lloyds Bank, chairman of Bristol United Breweries, and the head of a firm of mineral water manufacturers. Ellen was the daughter of a manager of the Warminster Savings Bank. Montague grew up in a luxurious home located next to Clifton Down and called "Tellisford House", which today is a listed building. He was educated as a day boy at the nearby Clifton College. Early on, he rebelled against his father's evangelical, low church religiosity, embracing instead a ritualistic Anglo-Catholicism. According to his biographer Brocard Sewell, there was a strain of mental illness in his mother's side of the family.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 degree in theology, promoted in 1906 to a Master of Arts 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, medievalism, 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, 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. 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.
Conversion to Catholicism
In 1909, Summers converted to Catholicism and began studying for the Catholic priesthood at St John's Seminary, Wonersh, receiving the clerical tonsure on 28 December 1910. After 1913 he styled himself as the "Reverend Alphonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague Summers" and acted as a Catholic priest, even though he was never a member of any Catholic order or diocese in England. After this time, he also consistently appeared in public in what Brocard Sewell described as "clerical attire reminiscent of some exotic abbé of the time of Louis Quatorze". Whether he was actually ordained as a priest is disputed.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 episcopi vagantes 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.
Work as a teacher
From 1911 to 1926 Summers found employment as a teacher of English, Latin, French, and history. He was an assistant master at Hertford Grammar School in 1911–1912, and then at the Junior School of the Central School of Arts and Crafts in Holborn in 1912–1922. During that time he also taught evening classes at London County Council schools. In 1922, he became senior English and Classics master at Brockley County School in south-east London. Despite his eccentric appearance and habits, he was apparently a successful and well-regarded teacher. Summers gave up teaching in 1926, after the success of his first book on witchcraft allowed him to adopt writing as his full-time occupation.Literary scholarship
While employed as a schoolmaster and with the encouragement of Arthur Henry Bullen of the Shakespeare Head Press, Summers established himself as an independent scholar specializing on the dramatic literature of the Stuart Restoration. In 1914 he published a critical edition of George Villiers's The Rehearsal. He then edited the plays of Aphra Behn, which appeared in 1915 in six volumes. That work was well received by other scholars and earned him election as fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1916.Restoration drama
Summers helped to create a new society called "The Phoenix" that performed "old plays", including long neglected Restoration comedies, and which operated from 1919 to 1925 under the patronage of Lady Cunard and with the support of Sir Edmund Gosse. It was succeeded by the "Renaissance Theatre", which gave occasional performances until 1928. Summers wrote extensive programme notes for those productions and offered his scholarly advice during rehearsals. That work made Summers a well known and popular figure in theatrical circles. Among Summers's associates in the London theater were actor Lewis Casson and his wife Sybil Thorndike. The novelist George Moore attended many of the Phoenix performances and befriended Summers.With the Nonesuch Press, Summers published critical editions of the collected plays of William Congreve, William Wycherley, and Thomas Otway. With Reginald Caton's Fortune Press, Summers edited the works of Thomas Shadwell. 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 and The Playhouse of Pepys 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
In 1917, Summers presented a lecture on Ann Radcliffe, the pioneering Gothic novelist, before the Royal Society of Literature. That same year he lectured the Society on Jane Austen in the context of the centenary of her death. In the 1920s Summers and another scholar, Michael Sadleir, rediscovered the seven obscure Gothic novels, known as the "Northanger Horrid Novels", that Austen mentioned in her Gothic parody novel Northanger Abbey. Many readers had come to suppose that the lurid titles were Austen's own invention, but Summers and Sadleir showed that they corresponded to novels published in the 1790s. Summers produced partial editions of two of those works.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, Victorian Ghost Stories, and The Grimoire and other Supernatural Stories. On the strength of that work, he has been described as "the major anthologist of supernatural and Gothic fiction" in the 1930s.