Nottingham Uni puts trigger warning on ‘expressions of Christian faith’

Students at the University of Nottingham have been warned they may find some course material distressing because of its Christian content.

Undergraduates opting for the School of English module ‘Chaucer and his Contemporaries, c.1380-c.1420’ were cautioned that some set texts contained “incidences of violence, mental illness and expressions of Christian faith”.

Medieval literature on the reading list for the module includes Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, The Vision of Piers Ploughman by William Langland and the mystic writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe.

Diversity and inclusion

The Mail on Sunday, which made the discovery through a Freedom of Information request, noted that while Nottingham views “expressions of Christian faith” as potentially ‘triggering’, no such warning is raised about sexually explicit or anti-Semitic content in Chaucer’s writings.

A University spokesman said it “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.”

‘Wokery’

Frank Furedi, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, blamed the move on “virtue signalling” by “ignorant academics”, and historian Jeremy Black described the incident as ‘tick-box nonsense’.

Dr Adrian Hilton, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham, observed that Christian themes “of mercy, sin, salvation and forgiveness” permeate Western literature. It struck him as odd, he said, “to slap one or two with a trigger warning”.

Writing in The Telegraph, Catherine Pepinster commented: “perhaps the most insidious aspect of this latest wokery is the idea that Christianity is part of the past, rather than acknowledging that it continues to be part of the warp and weft of British culture”.