Nottingham University Library has placed warnings on the works of medieval writers such as Chaucer, Gower and Hoccleve alerting viewers to “expressions of the Christian faith”.

The warnings have been met with backlash from Christian campaigners, who say Christian themes are not offensive, and should not warrant a warning.

The medieval classic The Canterbury Tales is one of the works which has been branded with a warning of Christian themes, alongside “violence” and “mental illness”. No warning was issued about the book's explicit references to anti-Semitism or rape.

Dr Adrian Hilton, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham, told Premier: “You’d be hard-pressed to remove Christian themes from literature.

“Themes of mercy, sin, salvation and forgiveness permeate our drama. To slap one or two with a trigger warning seems to be a bit odd.”

The University of Nottingham insisted that they were not preventing students from accessing the texts.

A spokesperson said: “The University of Nottingham 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.”

Dr Hilton however argues that the ‘shock factor’ of coming across controversy is part of literary analysis, and to pre-empt it dampens the significance of a text. “I want to explore these works and be horrified by them,” he told Premier: “There’s a danger that we end up viewing literature through the refracting lenses of our own obsession.”