| Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England | |
| Author: | Jean Sybil La Fontaine |
| Country: | United Kingdom |
| Language: | English |
| Subject: | Satanic ritual abuse |
| Genre: | Non-fiction |
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Pub Date: | 1998 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Isbn: | 0-521-62934-9 |
| Dewey: | 364.15/554/0941 21 |
| Congress: | HV6626.54.G7 L3 1998 |
| Oclc: | 36548968 |
Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England is a scholarly book by J. S. La Fontaine published in 1998 that discusses her investigation of allegations of satanic ritual abuse made in the United Kingdom. The book documents a detailed investigation of the accounts of children during a wave of allegations of satanic ritual abuse, as well as the processes within the social work profession that supported the allegations despite a lack of evidence.[1]
The book was reviewed by Joel Best,[2] T. M. Luhrmann,[3] James Beckford,[4] and I. K. Wier.[5] Robin Woffitt of the University of Surrey praised the book for clearly describing the origins of the satanic ritual abuse moral panic in the United Kingdom.[1]
The English archaeologist Timothy Taylor critically discussed Fontaine's work in his book The Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death (2002). He compared the work to the anthropologist William Arens's 1979 book The Man-Eating Myth, which he described as a "hollow certainty of viscerally insulated inexperience". Asserting that Arens's uses a flawed methodology that has echoes of Speak of the Devil, Taylor himself suggests that multiple claims of the Satanic ritual abuse have been incorrectly dismissed for being considered "improbable".[6]