According to recent reports, if you are a student at the University of Nottingham and you are going to sign up for a course on Chaucer, you will be warned beforehand that you may encounter “expressions of Christian faith.” A spokesman for the university, attempting to put a Very Serious Face on this infantilizing of young men and women, said that even Christians will find some features of late medieval Christianity “alienating and strange.” Not “new and fascinating,” not “intriguing, opening up a world of neglected truth,” not “brilliant and full of life,” but “alienating and strange.”

Whence I suggest a new stanza for the school’s song if it has one:
What’s in your brains that’s rotting ’em?
What politics besotting ’em?
If you’re afraid of learning, you
Can rest assured you’ll get your brew
While gulping gobbets of our stew
With other moonshine at the U-
-niversity of Nottingham,
-niversity of Nottingham.
Meanwhile, I am teaching a course at Thales College on medieval thought and literature, to reach its pinnacle in Dante’s La Vita Nuova and Purgatorio, a pinnacle of beauty, artistic brilliance, and profundity of insight into man-made in the image of God. These last two weeks we have been reading Arthurian romances by a genuine titan of literary accomplishment and innovation, the 12th-century Chretien de Troyes.
My most fundamental task is to show the students how to read so strange and ironical a tale as The Knight of the Cart, that is, his Lancelot, in an adulterous love affair with the wife of his king, benefactor, and friend. It is why Chretien, indulging his allegorical fancy and his keen sense of drama, pauses in his tale to tell us about carts in the land long ago and far away, and how they were used to expose traitors and assassins and other such villains to the most shameful reproach.
When Lancelot climbs into the cart, hesitating before he does so, but desperate to learn of the queen’s whereabouts, he is not Christ humbly and triumphantly entering Jerusal...