Speak of the Devil (book)

Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England is a scholarly

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]

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'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]

Publication details

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