The History of Witchcraft and Demonology

First published in 1926, Montague Summers’s controversial history treats European witchcraft as a real and coherent diabolical system rather than collective delusion. Drawing upon demonologists, trial records and ecclesiastical authorities, he examines pacts, sabbaths, heresy and persecution with absolute seriousness. Modern scholarship rejects many of his conclusions, yet the work remains an extraordinary document of occult historiography. It reads like a lamp carried through an archive whose shadows the author never doubts are alive.

Early twentieth-century British occult scholarship