 | |
| Author | Jean Sybil La Fontaine |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | Satanic ritual abuse |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Publication date | 1998 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Pages | 224 |
| ISBN | 0-521-62934-9 |
| OCLC | 36548968 |
| 364.15/554/0941 21 | |
| LC Class | HV6626.54.G7 L3 1998 |
Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England is a scholarlybook byJ. S. La Fontainepublished in 1998 thatdiscusses her investigation of allegations ofsatanic ritual abuse made in theUnited 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 thesocial work profession that supported the allegations despite a lack of evidence.[1]
The book was reviewed byJoel Best,[2]T. M. Luhrmann,[3]James Beckford,[4] and I. K. Wier.[5] Robin Woffitt of theUniversity of Surrey praised the book for clearly describing the origins of the satanicritual abusemoral panic in the United Kingdom.[1]
The English archaeologistTimothy Taylor critically discussed Fontaine's work in his bookThe Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death (2002). He compared the work to the anthropologist William Arens's 1979 bookThe Man-Eating Myth, which he described as a "hollow certainty of viscerally insulated inexperience". Asserting that Arens uses a flawed methodology that has echoes ofSpeak of the Devil, Taylor himself suggests that multiple claims of the Satanic ritual abuse have been incorrectly dismissed for being considered "improbable".[6]
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