David Vance SubstackRead More
We really shouldn’t be surprised to read that Nottingham University has slapped a trigger warning on Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales – because they contain ‘expressions of Christian faith’.
As a reminder the Canterbury Tales, written between 1387 and 1400, is a collection of stories about characters on a pilgrimage from London to the tomb of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. They include the promiscuous Wife of Bath, the drunken miller and the thieving reeve, who delight and shock each other with stories containing explicit references to rape, lust and even anti-Semitism.
It appears that a notice was issued to students studying 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 and fellow medieval writers William Langland, John Gower, and Thomas Hoccleve.
The brutal truth is that Academia has been fully captured by the cultural Marxists and they HATE any expression of Christianity, historical or otherwise. So their acolytes go through the literary canon searching out anything that explores Christian themes. Chaucer was doomed because he respected and admired Christians and was one himself, as he wrote in Canterbury Tales, “now I beg all those that listen to this little treatise, or read it, that if there be anything in it that pleases them, they thank Jesus Christ for it, from whom proceeds all understanding and goodness.”, though he was aware that as in any place some people in the church were venal and corrupt!
Chaucer is renowned as being “the father of English Poetry” and so it is ironic that an important English University now sees fit to attach a trigger warning to his greatest work!
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