Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England is a scholarly book by J. S. La Fontainepublished 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 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]
^Best, J; Fontaine, J. S. La (1999). "Reviewed work(s): Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England by J. S. La Fontaine". Contemporary Sociology. 28 (1). American Sociological Association: 107–108. doi:10.2307/2653911. JSTOR2653911.
^LUHRMANN, TM (2000). "Reviews - Speak of the Devil. Tales of satanic abuse in contemporary England. BY J. S. LA FONTAINE". Social Anthropology. 8 (1): 79–89. doi:10.1017/S0964028200230085.
^Beckford, JA (1999). "Book Review - J. S. La Fontaine, Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England". Sociology. 33 (1): 217–218. doi:10.1177/0038038599033001024. S2CID220675732.
^Weir, IK (1999). "Book Reviews - Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England. By J. S. La Fontaine". Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. 40 (5): 829–832. doi:10.1017/s0021963099213832.
