Ian Johnson

Old and Middle English literature and medieval literary thought.

Middle English Lives of Christ, Boethius translations, aspects of medieval devotional writing, gender and medieval literature.

Ian Johnson is Professor of Medieval Literature and a member of the Institute of Mediaeval Studies.He was Co-Director of the Queen’s Belfast-St Andrews AHRC-funded project Geographies of Orthodoxy: Mapping English Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ, 1350-1550 (2007-11). With Alastair Minnis he edited The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume II. The Middle Ages (2005; pbk 2009; Arabic edn 2016), and has published widely on Middle English literature, with particular interests in Latin and vernacular traditions of medieval literary theory and conceptions and practices of translation, as well as devotional literature, Geoffrey Chaucer, and miscellaneous textuality. He is founding General Editor of The Mediaeval Journal (Brepols) and was for many years General Editor of Forum for Modern Language Studies (OUP). His latest books areThe Middle English Life of Christ: Academic Discourse, Translation and Vernacular Theology (Brepols, 2013); The Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ: Exploring the Middle English Tradition, edited with Allan Westphall (Brepols, 2013); The Impact of Latin Culture on Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing, edited with Alessandra Petrina (Medieval Institute Publications, 2018), and Geoffrey Chaucer In Context, (Cambridge University Press, 2019). He was a Working Group Coordinator and Management Committee member of the EU-funded COST Action New Communities of Interpretation: Contexts, Strategies and Processes of Religious Transformation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Currently he is working on a study of the translation of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae in late medieval England and Scotland.