The Reverend Montague Summers was a Roman Catholic priest. However, his views on witchcraft and demonology differed considerably from those of Catholic encyclopedists and spokesmen of today. He is not ashamed of the greatest excesses committed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the contrary, he vigorously defends everything the Church ever did to extirpate witchcraft and heresy."The History of Witchcraft" is one of the classic works on witchcraft and demonology. Unlike other writers on the subject, Dr. Summers firmly believed in the concept world of Satanism and described its nefarious nature with tremendous gusto.
This book was written from what critics have called a medieval viewpoint, an absolute and complete belief in witchcraft and, hence, in the supernatural. Among the subjects covered by Dr. Summers are: The Witch; Heretic and Anarchist; Demons and Familiars; the Sabbat; the Witch in Holy Writ; Diabolic Possession and Modern Spiritism; and the Witch in Dramatic Literature.