Montague Summers - Malleus Maleficarum (746.0 Kb)
Book downloads: 457
Certain it is that the Malleus Maleficarum is the most solid, the most important work in the whole vast library of witchcraft. One turns to it again and again with edification and interest: From the point of psychology, from the point of jurisprudence, from the point of history, it is supreme. It has hardly too much to say that later writers, great as they are, have done little more than draw from the seemingly inexhaustible wells of wisdom which the two Dominicans, Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, have given us in the Ma... More >>>Book can be downloaded.
Note that, unfortunately, not all my books can be downloaded due to the restrictions of copyright. However, most of the books on this site do not have copyright restrictions. If you find any copyright violation, please contact me at . I am very attentive to the issue of copyright and try to avoid any violations, but on the other hand to help all fans of magic to get access to information.
If you are having difficulty downloading books, or you are looking for a book that is not on the site (but maybe it is in my home library), please write me a email to
and I will try to help, I can send the book by e-mail
darkbooks.org began in early 2008 I am happy to donate my time to providing you this resource, I would also like to note, that, although I try, I do not always have enough time to deal with the site, including, unfortunately, I do not always have time to answer all letters, because I have to earn money for a living. If you can financially help me, it would free me from the worries of earning money for living, perhaps partially, but ideally completely, then all 100% of my time could be devoted to the site. Also I do pay monthly web server/files storage and hosting costs to keep this site on the air. Please consider making a donation to help me continue this activity and devote more time to it or at least offset the cost of paying for storage/hosting. Even a small contribution helps!
Certain it is that the Malleus Maleficarum is the most solid, the most important work in the whole vast library of witchcraft. One turns to it again and again with edification and interest: From the point of psychology, from the point of jurisprudence, from the point of history, it is supreme. It has hardly too much to say that later writers, great as they are, have done little more than draw from the seemingly inexhaustible wells of wisdom which the two Dominicans, Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, have given us in the Malleus Maleficarum.
What is most surprising is the modernity of the book. There is hardly a problem, a complex, a difficulty, which they have not foreseen, and discussed, and resolved. Here are cases which occur in the law?courts to?day, set out with the greatest clarity, argued with unflinching logic, and judged with scrupulous impartiality. It is a work which must irresistibly capture the attention of all mean who think, all who see, or are endeavouring to see, the ultimate reality beyond the accidents of matter, time and space. The Malleus Maleficarum is one of the world's few books written sub specie aeternitatis.
About Author:
Augustus Montague Summers (10 April 1880 - 10 August 1948) was an English author and clergyman. He is known primarily for his scholarly work on the English drama of the 17th century, as well as for his idiosyncratic studies on witches, vampires, and werewolves, in all of which he professed to believe. He was responsible for the first English translation, published in 1928, of the notorious 15th-century witch hunter's manual, the Malleus Maleficarum.
Montague Summers was the youngest of the seven children of Augustus William Summers, a rich 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 priest in the Church of England. In 1905 he received a fourth-class Bachelor of Arts degree. He then continued his religious training at the Lichfield Theological College.
Summers was ordained as deacon in 1908 and worked as a curate in Bath and Bitton, in Greater Bristol. He never proceeded to higher orders, however, probably because of rumours of his interest in Satanism and accusations of sexual impropriety with young boys, for which he was tried and acquitted.[1] Summers' first book, Antinous and Other Poems, published in 1907, was dedicated to the subject of pederasty.
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. Whether he was ever actually ordained as a priest is a matter of dispute.
Literary scholarship:
Summers worked for several years as an English and Latin teacher at various schools, including Brockley County School in south-east London, before adopting writing as his full-time employment. He was interested in the theatre 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.
Montague Summers also produced important studies of the Gothic fiction genre and edited two collections of Gothic horror short stories, as well as an incomplete edition of two of the seven obscure Gothic novels, known as the Northanger Horrid Novels, mentioned by Jane Austen in her Gothic parody Northanger Abbey. He was instrumental in rediscovering those lost works, which some had supposed were an invention of Jane Austen herself. He also published biographies of writers Jane Austen and Ann Radcliffe.
Summers compiled three anthologies of supernatural stories, The Supernatural Omnibus, The Grimoire and other Supernatural Stories, and Victorian Ghost Stories. Summers has been described as "the major anthologist of supernatural and Gothic fiction" in the 1930s.
The occult:
Summers' career as an ostensibly Catholic clergyman was highly unusual. He wrote works of hagiography on Saint Catherine of Siena and Saint Anthony Maria Zaccaria, but his primary religious interest was in the subject of the occult. While Aleister Crowley, with whom he was acquainted, adopted the persona of a modern-day witch, Summers played the part of the learned Catholic witch-hunter. In the introduction to his book on The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (1926) he writes:
In the following pages I have endeavoured to show the witch as she really was - an evil liver: a social pest and parasite: the devotee of a loathly and obscene creed: an adept at poisoning, blackmail, and other creeping crimes: a member of a powerful secret organisation inimical to Church and State: a blasphemer in word and deed, swaying the villagers by terror and superstition: a charlatan and a quack sometimes: a bawd: an abortionist: the dark counsellor of lewd court ladies and adulterous gallants: a minister to vice and inconceivable corruption, battening upon the filth and foulest passions of the age.
In 1928, he published the first English translation of Heinrich Kramer's and James Sprenger's Malleus Maleficarum ("The Hammer of Witches"), a 15th-century Latin text on the hunting of witches. In his introduction, Summers insists that the reality of witchcraft is an essential part of Catholic doctrine, and declares the Malleus to be an admirable and correct account of witchcraft and of the methods necessary to combat it. This should be contrasted with the vastly more sceptical and critical attitude of mainstream Catholic scholars, reflected for instance in the Rev. Herbert Thurston's article on "Witchcraft" for the Catholic Encyclopaedia of 1912, which labels the publication of the Malleus a "disastrous episode."
Montague Summers then turned to vampires, producing The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928) and The Vampire in Europe (1929), and later to werewolves with The Werewolf (1933). Summers' work on the occult is notorious for his unusual and old-fashioned writing style, his display of erudition, and his purported belief in the reality of the subjects he treats.
Other pursuits:
Summers cultivated his reputation for eccentricity. The Times of London wrote he was "in every way a 'character' and in some sort a throwback to the Middle Ages." His biographer, Brocard Sewell (writing under the pseudonym "Joseph Jerome"), paints the following portrait of Summers:
During the year 1927, the striking and somber figure of the Reverend Montague Sommers in black soutane and cloak, with buckled shoes--a la Louis Quatorze--and shovel hat could often have been seen entering or leaving the reading room of the British Museum, carrying a large black portfolio bearing on its side a white label, showing in blood-red capitals, the legend 'VAMPIRES'.
Despite his conservative religiosity, Summers was an active member of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, to which he contributed an essay on the Marquis de Sade.
Death:
Montague Summers died at his home in Richmond, Surrey in August 1948. An autobiography The Galanty Show was published posthumously in 1980, though much is left unrevealed about his life. His grave in Richmond Cemetery was unmarked until the late 1980s, when Sandy Robertson and Edwin Pouncey organised the Summers Project to garner donations for a gravestone. It bears his favoured phrase "tell me strange things". Summers's manservant Hector Stuart-Forbes is buried in the same plot.[5]
Works:
Books on the occult:
- The History of Witchcraft and Demonology, 1926
- The Geography of Witchcraft, 1927 (reprinted ISBN 0-7100-7617-7)
- The Vampire: His Kith and Kin, 1928 (reprinted by Senate in 1993 as simply The Vampire; reprinted with alternate title: Vampires and Vampirism ISBN 0-486-43996-8), edited by John Edgar Browning
- The Vampire in Europe, 1929 (reprinted ISBN 0-517-14989-3) (reprinted with alternate title: The Vampire in Lore and Legend ISBN 0-486-41942-8)
- The Werewolf, 1933 (reprinted with alternate title: The Werewolf in Lore and Legend ISBN 0-486-43090-1)
- A Popular History of Witchcraft, 1937
- Witchcraft and Black Magic, 1946 (reprinted ISBN 1-55888-840-3, ISBN 0-486-41125-7)
- The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism, 1947
Poetry and drama:
- Antinous and Other Poems, 1907
- William Henry (play), 1939
- Edward II (play), 1940
Fiction:
- The Grimoire and Other Supernatural Stories, 1936
- Supernatural Tales, 1947
Other books:
- St. Catherine of Siena, 1903
- Lourdes, 1904
- A Great Mistress of Romance: Ann Radcliffe, 1917
- Jane Austen, 1919
- St. Antonio-Maria Zaccaria, 1919
- Architecture and the Gothic Novel, 1931
- The Restoration Theatre, 1934
- Essays in Petto 1933
- The Playhouse of Pepys, 1935
- The Gothic Quest: a History of the Gothic Novel 1938
- A Gothic Bibliography 1941 (copyright 1940)
As editor or translator:
- Works of Mrs. Aphra Behn, 1915
- Complete Works of Congreve, 1923
- Complete Works of Wycherley, 1924
- The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, 1924
- The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, 1927
- Covent Garden Drollery, 1927
- Horrid Mysteries by the Marquis de Grosse 1927 (part of an incomplete edition of the Northanger Horrid Novels).
- The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest by 'Ludwig Flammenberg' 1927 (part of an incomplete edition of the 'Northanger Horrid Novels').
- Demoniality by Ludovico Maria Sinistrari, 1927
- The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, 1928
- The Discovery of Witches, 1928 by Matthew Hopkins (reprinted ISBN 0-404-18416-2)
- Compendium Maleficarum by Francesco Maria Guazzo, translated by E.A. Ashwin, 1929
- Demonolatry by Nicolas Remy, translated by E.A. Ashwin, 1930
- The Supernatural Omnibus, 1931 (reprinted ISBN 0-88356-037-2)
- Victorian Ghost Stories, 1936
- The Poems of Richard Barnfield, 1936
- The Complete Works of Thomas Otway, 1936
Source: wiki