What does the Ip mean in the Bayesian Ridge Regression formula?
$\mathcal{N}$ does indeed denote a (multivariate) normal / Gaussian distribution. $I_p$ is just an identity matrix of dimension $p$. So this a matrix with $\lambda^{-1}$ along the diagonal. Read this as the covariance matrix, so this is a spherical Gaussian (0 covariance between different dimensions) where each variable has variance $\lambda^{-1}$.