After Richard of St Victor, it is reasonably safe to leave aside other medieval thinkers and move directly to Thomas Aquinas, whose treatment of persons, according to Spaemann, follows on in sequence from Richard’s but exhibits greater ‘perspicuity and clarity’.1 This, though true, may underestimate the importance of a change in the historical context of the two authors, for Richard was still living in a largely ‘pre-Aristotelian’, patristically determined world where human persons, as images and likenesses of God, were subjects of reflection with primary reference to the divine Persons. It is no accident that Richard, in the footsteps of Augustine, attended to persons in works principally devoted to Trinitarian theology while Boethius, though offering an Aristotelian-sounding definition of the person, published it in a rather technical treatise against Trinitarian heresies,