The International Boethius Society Welcomes Ian Johnson as New President

The International Boethius Society (IBS) warmly welcomes longtime member and Boethian scholar, Professor Ian Johnson, as our new president. Johnson accepted his new position at our IBS business meeting held on June 10, 2025, at the Twelfth Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SMRS) at Saint Louis University.

Johnson is Professor of Medieval Literature and a member of the Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the University of St Andrews. He co-directed the Queen’s Belfast-St Andrews AHRC-funded project Geographies of Orthodoxy (2007-11). With Alastair Minnis, he edited The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume II. The Middle Ages (2005). His other major publications include The Middle English Life of Christ (2013), The Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ, ed. with Allan Westphall (2013), The Impact of Latin Culture on Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing, ed. with Alessandra Petrina (2018), Geoffrey Chaucer in Context (ed. 2019), and Literary Theory and Criticism in the Later Middle Ages, ed. with Ardis Butterfield and Andrew Kraebel. 

A contributor to Brill’s A Companion to Boethius in the Middle Ages (2012) and Vernacular Traditions of Boethius’s De consolation philosophiae (2016), both edited by Noel Harold Kaylor, Jr., and Philip Edward Phillips, he is currently working on a study of the translation of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae in late medieval England and Scotland. Ian Johnson is our fifth president—following Margaret Gibson, Michael Masi, J. Keith Atkinson, and Paul E. Szarmach—since the Society’s founding in 1992.

Philip Edward Phillips, IBS Secretary

Fabio Troncarelli - New Book

International Boethius Society Trustee Fabio Troncarelli has just published a volume on Living Memory: Boethius, Cassiodorus, and the Consolation of Philosophy, Brill - V&R Press, 2025, with 63 figures.

Fabio Troncarelli examines the Late Antique Cassiodorus edition of the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius in this study consisting of five chapters. The first one is a brief sketch of the biography of the two protagonists of the story. The second is about the medieval copies of the edition, some very close to the original archetype, preserving even its formal aspect and the indication of its first transcription in Ravenna in the 6th century. The third chapter establishes a comparison between some typical rhetorical, philosophical or editorial methods by Cassiodorus and the ones we find in the Boethius' edition. The fourth chapter explains what could have been the reasons for Cassiodorus to make such an edition, in the years of the breakdown of the Osthrogotic rule in Italy. The last chapter is about the afterlife of Boethius' reputation in Vivarium and the relationships between his murder and Amalsuntha's murder established by the Vivarian monks. (from the publisher's description: available on Amazon)