Montague Summers (1880–1948), born Augustus Montague Summers, was one of the most singular scholars of early twentieth-century England. Educated at Oxford and initially destined for the Anglican priesthood, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1909 after a brief and controversial curacy, thereafter styling himself “the Reverend” though never formally attached to any diocese. A respected scholar of Restoration drama — he edited the complete works of Aphra Behn, Congreve, and Wycherley, earning him election to the Royal Society of Literature in 1916 — Summers was at the same time England’s foremost chronicler of the occult. The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (1926) was followed by The Geography of Witchcraft (1927), the first English translation of the Malleus Maleficarum (1928), and studies of vampires and werewolves. Unlike other antiquarians of his day, Summers never treated witchcraft as folklore to be catalogued from a comfortable distance: he maintained, as a matter of theological conviction, the historical reality of the diabolic pact — a position that placed him in open dispute with the rationalist, anthropological scholarship of his time, Margaret Murray foremost among them.
