University Puts Trigger Warning on “Expressions of Christian Faith” in Chaucer

They will not rest until they have destroyed everything good, true, or beautiful! 'Trigger warnings' on a 14th-century work about a pilgrimage?

From The European Conservative

By Nick Hallett

The University of Nottingham's “content note” on The Canterbury Tales is “demeaning” and “weird,” critics say.

A leading UK university has been strongly criticised for putting a trigger warning on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales advising students that the work contains “expressions of Christian faith.”

Critics say the University of Nottingham is “demeaning education” for warning students that the Medieval collection of stories of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury Cathedral may contain Christianity.

The Mail on Sunday obtained details of the “content notice” through a request made under Freedom of Information laws. The warning, which applies to a modular course called “Chaucer and His Contemporaries,” advises students of violence, mental illness, and “expressions of Christian faith” in the works of Chaucer, along with William Langland, John Gower, and Thomas Hoccleve—all of whom lived in the late 14th and early 15th centuries.

The Canterbury Tales is one of the most famous works of Medieval English literature. It is a collection of stories about various characters on their way to the tomb of Saint Thomas Becket, then one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in Europe. The stories also contain explicit references to rape and antisemitism, neither of which the university’s warning mentions.

Evangelical campaign group Christian Concern wondered whether the university would issue a similar warning for other religions. Andrea Williams, the group’s chief executive, said: 

The Bible is foundational to understanding the history of English literature. Without an understanding of the Christian faith, there will be no way for students to access the world of Chaucer and his contemporaries. It’s ludicrous to issue such trigger warnings. From what point in history are we going to censor literary texts, given most are steeped in a Christian worldview?

Trigger warnings for Christian themes in literature are demeaning to the Christian faith and stifle the academic progress of our students. To censor expressions of the Christian faith is to erase our literary heritage. True education engages and fosters understanding, not avoidance.

Frank Furedi, director of MCC Brussels and an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, added:

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.

Meanwhile, historian Jeremy Black, author of English Culture, said: 

It is odd that anybody living in Britain should find it challenging to read works from our literary heritage that include expressions of Christian faith. Presumably, this Nottingham nonsense is a product of the need to validate courses in accordance with tick-box criteria. It is simultaneously sad, funny, a perversion of intellectual life and a demeaning of education.

However, the University of Nottingham tried to defend itself. A spokesman said: “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-mediaeval worldview they will encounter in Chaucer and others alienating and strange.”

The row comes after a prestigious academic journal was heavily criticised for erasing the term “Anglo-Saxon” from its title earlier this year. 

Anglo-Saxon England, a journal published by the University of Cambridge since 1972, changed its name to Early Medieval England and Its Neighbours to represent the “international, interdisciplinary and rapidly evolving nature of research in this field,” the university claimed.

However, historian and author Dominic Sandbrook accused them of changing the title because they are “total drips” who “didn’t have the courage to say no to a handful of mad Americans.”

Pictured: A woodcut from Richard Pynson's 1491/1492 edition of The Canterbury Tales