.jpg?width=1200&auto=webp)
Students studying a module on Geoffrey Chaucer at the University of Nottingham have been issued a trigger warning for ‘expressions of Christian faith’ in his famous Canterbury Tales.
The warning is provided to students studying the Chaucer and His Contemporaries module, according to a report in the Mail obtained under Freedom of Information laws.
The university explained that the warning was introduced due to the text's depiction of Christianity from a 14th-century perspective and its historical context.
“Even those who are practising Christians will find aspects of the late-medieval worldview... alienating and strange,” a spokesperson for the University of Nottingham said in a statement.
The Canterbury Tales consists of 24 short stories written between 1387 to 1400, the year that Chaucer died. It is considered an unfinished work.
The tales are framed as a storytelling contest between pilgrims, who entertain themselves while travelling from London to the tomb of Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.
It is regarded a groundbreaking piece of literature in English, which was not the dominant language for written texts at the time.
Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, 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 are bound to be a lot of expressions of faith. The problem is not would-be student readers of Chaucer but virtue-signalling, ignorant academics.”
While some of the stories contain sexual undertones and references to antisemitism this is not mentioned in the trigger warning.
Historian Jeremy Black added: “Presumably, this Nottingham nonsense is a product of the need to validate courses in accordance with tick-box criteria. It is simultaneously sad, funny and a demeaning of education.”
The Standard has contacted the University of Nottingham for a response.
