In a move that critics say is “demeaning of education”, a prestigious Russell Group university has placed a trigger warning on Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales because of its potentially offensive “expressions of Christian faith” (GB News,Telegraph, Standard).
Under Freedom of Information (FoI) laws, the Mail on Sunday obtained details of the notice issued to students at the University of Nottingham who are enrolled on a module called ‘Chaucer and His Contemporaries’. It alerts them to incidences of violence, mental illness and expressions of Christian faith in the works of Chaucer as well as other medieval writers, including William Langland, John Gower and Thomas Hoccleve.
Chaucer’s medieval collection of 24 tales were written between 1387 and 1400, and tell the story of various characters on a pilgrimage from London to the tomb of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral – including the promiscuous Wife of Bath, the bawdy, cheating Miller, and the Prioress, who is overly concerned with manners and appearance.
To pass the time, they delight and shock each other with stories containing explicit references to rape, lust and even anti-Semitism – indeed, in ‘The Prioress’s Tale’, Chaucer invokes the blood libel motif, a centuries old anti-semitic canard, to portray Jews as aroused by satanic urges to murder Christian children.
Nottingham’s safetyist administrators chose – rightly – to let students discover this aspect to Chaucer in and as part of their engagement with the module in question, but then badly blotted their copybook by pre-empting students to find representations of (late-Medieval) Christianity ‘problematic’ and ‘dangerous’.
Critics have since accused the University of Nottingham of “demeaning education” with its “ludicrous” and “weird” trigger warning.
Speaking to the Telegraph, Andrea Williams, the chief executive of Christian Concern, said that “without an understanding of the Christian faith there will be no way for students to access the world of Chaucer and his contemporaries.
“From what point in history are we going to censor literary texts given most are steeped in a Christian world view?” she added. “Trigger warnings for Christian themes in literature are demeaning to the Christian faith and stifle the academic progress of our students.
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 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.’
A spokesperson for the university said it “champions diversity”, adding: “Even those who are practising Christians will find aspects of the late-medieval worldview… alienating and strange.”
It comes amid the seemingly unstoppable rise of safetyism on campus, with ever more works of literature getting slapped with ‘trigger warnings’.
In 2022, a Times investigation uncovered 1,081 ‘trigger warnings’ applied to texts across undergraduate courses in the UK.
It also revealed that 10 universities, including Russell Group members Warwick, Exeter and Glasgow, had actually removed or made optional books that students might find ‘harmful’.
During the investigation, academics attempted to block the newspaper from discovering details about changes to their reading lists, using social media to encourage each other not to comply with FoI requests, while some universities declined to answer on the grounds that disclosure would have a “potentially negative personal impact” on staff.
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, a novel intended to illuminate the horrors of slavery, was removed from a reading list by Essex University for containing “graphic description of violence and abuse of slavery”.
Likewise, Miss Julie by August Strindberg, a play tackling themes of mental anguish, was removed from the Sussex syllabus because it “contains discussion of suicide”.
It’s not immediately clear why university administrators feel they have the right to decide that the “harm” to students that books of this kind supposedly risk outweighs the intellectual benefits that they would undoubtedly confer upon them.
Last year, a former senior university administrator claimed that the introduction of trigger warnings on university texts is teaching students to become fragile and childlike (Scottish Daily Express, Times).
In an essay for the Scottish Union for Education, Linda Murdoch, the former Director of Careers at the University of Glasgow, argued that undergraduates are being infantilised by suggestions that they need to be protected from ideas that might upset them.
“Given the proliferation of reports about the fragility of students, you might be forgiven for thinking that higher education is deeply harmful,” she wrote. “Or alternatively, you might be forgiven for thinking that those that describe young people as frail, flaky or snowflakes have a point.
“It’s almost every day a university announces trigger warnings cautioning students about course material, or a student group demands a safe space away from hurtful ideas.”
She went on to point out that issues such as stress over meeting essay deadlines or exam anxiety were now seen as threats to a student’s mental health, rather than normal emotional reactions.
“Students today have been taught to fear their thoughts and feelings,” she continued, “and it is this, together with the pathologisation of their everyday emotions and the promotion of risks and campaigns in help-seeking behaviour, that have led to more of them reporting themselves to be emotionally fragile.”
