Country United Kingdom Publication date 1998 ISBN 0-521-62934-9 Originally published 1998 Page count 224 Subject Satanic ritual abuse | Language English Pages 224 OCLC 36548968 Genre Non-fiction | |
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Publisher Cambridge University Press Similar Treating Survivors of Satanis, Cult and Ritual Abuse, The Day Care Ritual Abuse M, Michelle Remembers, Satanic Panic: The Creation | ||
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.
Contents
Academic reviews
The book was reviewed by Joel Best, T. M. Luhrmann James Beckford and I. K. Wier. 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.
Subsequent academic reception
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' 1979 book The Man-Eating Myth, which he described as a "hollow certainty of viscerally insulated inexperience". Asserting that Arens' 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".