A top university in England has sparked backlash after giving students a trigger warning before reading The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer as seminal work contains “expressions of Christian faith”.
The University of Nottingham issued a series of woke warnings to students studying a module called ‘Chaucer and His Contemporaries’, the Mail on Sunday revealed following a Freedom of Information request.
According to the paper, supposedly fragile-minded students were warned that the 14th Century Canterbury Tales, which describe a pilgrimage to the tomb of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral, contain violence, depictions of mental illness, and “expressions of Christian faith”.
Interestingly, despite the mediaeval work previously coming under criticism for alleged antisemitism, Nottingham university did not deign it necessary to give a trigger warning to students about such content. Sexually explicit content is also noticeably left out of the school’s warnings.
Other course material to be slapped with warnings included the Arthurian poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is laden with Christian beliefs and symbolism. Meanwhile, students are told that William Langland’s allegorical narrative poem Piers Plowman is “rich ecclesiastical politics” and “Christian virtue”.
Criticising the anti-Christian attacks, Emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent Frank Furedi said: “Warning students of Chaucer about Christian expressions of faith is weird.
“Since all characters in the stories are immersed in a Christian experience there is bound to be a lot of expressions of faith. The problem is not would-be student readers of Chaucer but virtue-signalling, ignorant academics.”
The Christian Concern campaign group also took aim at the University of Nottingham, with chief executive Andrea Williams arguing that because the Bible is “foundational” to much of Western literature, an understanding of Christianity is necessary for students studying works by Chaucer and others.
“To censor expressions of the Christian faith is to erase our literary heritage. True education engages and fosters understanding, not avoidance,” she said.
“Our universities should allow students who have chosen to study some of the greatest works in English literature, the freedom of academic thought to make up their own minds rather than planting loaded warnings about the Christian faith.”
A spokesman for the university defended the move, saying that the school “champions diversity, and its student body is made up of people of all faiths and none.”
“This content notice does not assume that all our students come from a Christian background, but even those students who are practising Christians will find aspects of the late-medieval worldview they will encounter in Chaucer and others alienating and strange.”
The disclosure of the woke warnings come just days after another woke on perhaps Nottingham’s most famous figure, the mythological outlaw hero Robin Hood. The city’s Building Society announced earlier this month that it is dropping Robin Hood from its logo in an effort to promote “inclusivity” and to better “reflect society as it is today.”