I don't know, Chaucer, you could read something..."The Canterbury Tales" might be right up your alley.

I was referring to the Archbishop of Canterbury, not Augustine.

I grant you that "consensus" isn't the right word for official Catholic dogma enacted by the Pope and enforced by burning heretics. No doubt some remained totally ignorant of Genesis. But most people believed the official dogma because they hadn't been exposed to anything else. It's not that they were stupid, they were just ill-informed. Before the invention of the printing press, 99% of the people in Catholic territory were illiterate and most of those who could read or write worked for the church (priests, monks, etc.)

Find me one person in Catholic Europe between 500CE and 1500CE who said the earth was more than 20,000 years old and Adam & Eve didn't exist. If it happened, we might not know, since the church loved to burn heretics and their books.

Since theologians have a motive to not completely dismiss Genesis as fraudulent (not divinely inspired), they call it an allegory. The moral of the allegory seems to be "Do whatever God tells you, even if you don't understand why. Don't seek forbidden knowledge, or else!". I don't like that moral. Believing in it facilitates tyranny by whoever pretends to carry "God's word".