Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England

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
Dewey Decimal	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 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]

• La Fontaine, J. S. (1998). Speak of the Devil: allegations of satanic abuse in Britain. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-62934-9.