Montague Summers

Montague Summers' The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928) is one of the earliest-and still one of the most wide-ranging-English-language studies of vampire belief. Summers treats "the vampire" as a comparative subject rather than a single fictional stereotype, gathering traditions of the dangerous dead, tracing how different societies explained vampirism and its causes, describing characteristic signs and customary protections, and setting European material beside parallels from earlier and wider horizons, including the ancient Near East. The book closes by following the vampire into modern literature, showing how folklore, report, and imagination became entangled. This Serpent Books edition is a clean facsimile reprint of the 1928 volume, prepared from newly scanned pages and manually restored for consistent readability. It includes a brief Editor's Note by Nikolas rhem. Companion volumes in this Montague Summers line include The Vampire in Europe and The Werewolf-A Study in Myth, Folklore, and Fear (Serpent Library Classics).

In all the darkest pages of the malign supernatural there is no more terrible tradition than that of the Vampire, a pariah even among demons. Foul are his ravages; gruesome and seemingly barbaric are the ancient and approved methods by which folk must rid themselves of this hideous pest. Even to-day in certain quarters of the world, in remoter districts of Europe itself, Transylvania, Slavonia, the isles and mountains of Greece, thepeasant will take the law into his own bands and utterly destroy the carrion who--as it is yet firmly believed--at night will issue from his unhallowed grave to spread the infection of vampirism throughout the countryside. Assyria knew the vampire long ago, and he lurked amid the primaeval forests of Mexico before Cortes came. He is feared by the Chinese, by the Indian, and the Malay alike; whilst Arabian story tells us again and again of the ghouls who haunt ill-omened sepulchres and lonely cross-ways to attack and devour the unhappy traveller.

Montague Summers' "English Witchcraft - From the Beginning to the Present Day" contains a detailed history of witchcraft in England from its earliest records to the early twentieth century. Contents include: "Part I of English Witchcraft from the Beginning until the Repeal of the Law, 1736", and "Part II of English Witchcraft from the Passing of the Statute of 1736 until the Present Day". Augustus Montague Summers (1880 - 1948) was an English clergyman and author most famous for his studies on vampires, witches and werewolves--all of which he believed to be very much real. He also wrote the first English translation of the infamous 15th-century witch hunter's manual, the "Malleus Maleficarum", in 1928. Other notable works by this author include: "A Popular History of Witchcraft" (1937), "Witchcraft and Black Magic" (1946), and "The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism" (1947). Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.