They do things differently there.
Nottingham University has now been accused of ‘demeaning education’ for warning students about the religious elements of Chaucer’s stories – saying that anyone studying one of the most famous works in English literature would hardly have to have the Christian references pointed out.
The Mail on Sunday has obtained details of the notice issued to students studying a module called Chaucer and His Contemporaries under Freedom of Information laws. 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.
Good God almighty. Chaucer was a medieval poet. He apologises for being long dead before moronic wokery took hold and was therefore unable to tone down his work in order to pander to such sensibilities.
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.
However, the university’s warning makes no reference to the anti-Semitism or sexually explicit themes.
Of course not. They are all okay. It’s the Christianity that they despise.
A university spokesman said it ‘champions diversity’, adding: ‘Even those who are practising Christians will find aspects of the late-medieval worldview… alienating and strange.’
It’s written in middle English – before the great vowel shift – so is odd to modern readers from the outset. England was a feudal country with a radically different society and belief system. An absolute monarchy and a Catholic church. Of course it would seem strange to modern eyes. That’s the point of education – to understand a little more the people who came before us. To learn from them.
The people who run Nottingham University are cretins. Not just cretins but philistines.
Guess l must be a proud ‘foreigner’ then as l prefer the country l was born in (England, mid 50’s) to the one l live in today (England, 2024).
Or maybe l’m just a dinasaur and simply don’t ‘get’ the modern world
I love modern technology, I have quite a few high tech toys and I enjoy using them. Also my car, even though it’s twelve years old now, it has performance and fuel economy that I could only have dreamed of when I first started driving in the 1970s. The state of politics and the pervasive anti intellectualism, not so much.
“They include the promiscuous Wife of Bath, the drunken miller and the thieving reeve…”
Much like today then unless the po-faced Labour roundheads manage to remove joy altogether.
Isn’t it all based round the Christian pilgrimage to Canterbury so religious on outset.
It was a long time ago that we covered them a bit at school. It was an all girls school and the contents produced a lot of sniggering.
Usually the Miller’s tale.