47 Facts About Montague Summers

Montague Summers then converted to Roman Catholicism and began styling himself as a Catholic priest.

Montague Summers was 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.

Montague Summers produced scholarly work on Gothic fiction and published several anthologies of horror stories.

Montague Summers wrote some original works of fiction, none of which were published in his lifetime.

Montague Summers grew up in a luxurious home located next to Clifton Down and called "Tellisford House", which today is a listed building.

Montague Summers was educated as a day boy at the nearby Clifton College.

Montague Summers continued his religious training at Lichfield Theological College with the intention of becoming a priest in the Church of England.

Montague Summers self-published his first book, Antinous and Other Poems, in 1907.

Montague Summers dedicated that book to the writer Jacques d'Adelsward-Fersen, who was notorious for having been convicted years earlier by a court in Paris of "inciting minors to debauchery".

Montague Summers was ordained as deacon in 1908 by George Forrest Browne, the Bishop of Bristol.

Montague Summers was then appointed as curate in Bitton, near Bristol.

Some of his former associates, including Redwood Anderson, claim that in his early years Montague Summers conducted such ceremonies himself.

Montague Summers was not prosecuted and he returned to England soon thereafter.

In 1909, Montague 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.

Some sources claim that Montague Summers then travelled to Continental Europe and was ordained by Cardinal Mercier in Belgium or by Archbishop Guido Maria Conforti in Italy.

Brocard Sewell argued that "there is a strong probability, if not a moral certainty" that Montague Summers had been validly but perhaps illicitly ordained as a priest.

Sewell gave as evidence the facts that Montague Summers was allowed to say mass publicly when he travelled in the Continent and that Monsignor Ronald Knox, although wholly unsympathetic and opposed to Montague Summers, regarded him as actually being a Catholic priest.

From 1911 to 1926 Montague Summers found employment as a teacher of English, Latin, French, and history.

Montague 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.

Montague Summers then edited the plays of Aphra Behn, which appeared in 1915 in six volumes.

Montague 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.

Montague Summers wrote extensive programme notes for those productions and offered his scholarly advice during rehearsals.

In 1917, Montague Summers presented a lecture on Ann Radcliffe, the pioneering Gothic novelist, before the Royal Society of Literature.

In 1938, Montague Summers published a history of the Gothic novel titled The Gothic Quest, which was later praised by the French scholar Andre Parreaux as "a unique and valuable book, indispensable to the student of the period".

Montague Summers compiled three anthologies of supernatural stories: The Supernatural Omnibus, Victorian Ghost Stories, and The Grimoire and other Supernatural Stories.

Montague Summers edited the poetry of Richard Barnfield, a contemporary of Shakespeare.

From 1916 onwards, Montague Summers regularly published articles in popular occult periodicals, including The Occult Review and the Spiritualist periodical Light.

Montague Summers presented modern spiritualism as a continuation of older forms of witchcraft and necromancy.

Montague Summers expressed belief in the existence of demons, their role in possession and exorcism, and other preternatural phenomena associated with their activity.

Montague Summers 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.

In 1927 Montague Summers published a companion volume, The Geography of Witchcraft, as part of Ogden's "History of Civilization" series.

In 1928, Montague Summers published the first full English translation of the Malleus Maleficarum, a Latin manual on the detection and prosecution of witches written in the 15th century by the Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger.

Yet Montague Summers was well steeped in the sources, and his insight that European witchcraft was basically a perversion of Christianity and related to heresy, rather than the survival of a pagan religion as the Murrayites claimed, was correct.

Montague Summers' work was erratic and unreliable but not without value.

Montague 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.

In 1926, Montague Summers advertised in the London Times for a secretary to assist him with his literary work.

Channon recounts that, on more than one occasion and at Channon's suggestion, Montague Summers took Channon upstairs to his private chapel after dinner and beat him over the altar.

Montague Summers lived in Oxford from 1929 to 1934, where he often worked at the Bodleian Library and attended high mass at Blackfriars.

Montague Summers 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 Doctor Faustus".

Montague Summers wrote several original works of fiction, but none of these were published during his lifetime.

Father Thurston called attention to the fact that Montague 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.

Thurston publicly challenged Montague Summers to show that he was really an ordained priest, which Montague Summers failed to do.

Brocard Sewell, Montague Summers was well known but generally mal vu among English Dominicans in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Catholic Bishop of Southwark, Peter Amigo, excommunicated Mrs Greville-Nugent for allowing Montague Summers to celebrate mass in the private oratory at Kingsley Dene, her home in Dulwich.

Montague Summers died suddenly at his home in Richmond, Surrey in August 1948.

Montague Summers bequeathed his estate and papers to his long-time personal secretary and companion Hector Stuart-Forbes.

An autobiography of Montague 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.