A Popular History of Witchcraft

FIRST EDITION, half title, illustrated frontispiece, 8 plates, occasional light foxing, publishers yellow cloth, title printed on spine in green, inner hinge cracked, lacking dust jacket, 8vo, London, Kagan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1937

First published in 1937, this volume offers an overview of witchcraft and its practices and history, written by Montague Summers.

“Sets forth to show that the traffic in black magic is as wide-spread amongst us in the twentieth century, as keenly pursued in London, in Paris, in New York, in all great cities, as once it was during the middle ages, and in the days of Elizabeth and James, under the Valois and Louis XIV…” – dust jacket.

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.