About the Author:
About the Author:
"Augustus Montague Summers (10 April 1880 - 10 August 1948) was an eccentric English 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.
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 including Brockley County School in S E London, 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 was one of the founder members of The Phoenix, 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. His biographer Father Brocard Sewell asserts that he was ordained a deacon in the Church of England in 1908, and thus was properly addressed as "Reverend" in any case..." (Quote from wikipedia.org)
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