Conor O'Brien – författare

Burke's seminal work was written during the early months of the French Revolution, and it predicted with uncanny accuracy many of its worst excesses, including the Reign of Terror. A scathing attack on the revolution's attitudes to existing institutions, property and religion, it makes a cogent case for upholding inherited rights and established customs, argues for piecemeal reform rather than revolutionary change - and deplores the influence Burke feared the revolution might have in Britain. Reflections on the Revolution in France is now widely regarded as a classic statement of conservative political thought, and is one of the eighteenth century's great works of political rhetoric.

This volume examines the use of the image of the Jewish temple in the writings of the Anglo-Saxon theologian and historian, Bede (d. 735). The various Jewish holy sites described in the Bible possessed multiple different meanings for Bede and therefore this imagery provides an excellent window into his thought. Bede's Temple: An Image and its Interpretation examines Bede's use of the temple to reveal his ideas of history, the universe, Christ, the Church, and the individual Christian. Across his wide body of writings Bede presented an image of unity, whether that be the unity of Jew and gentile in the universal Church, or the unity of human and divine in the incarnate Christ, and the temple-image provided a means of understanding and celebrating that unity. Conor O'Brien argues that Bede's understanding of the temple was part of the shared spirituality and communal discourse of his monastery at Wearmouth-Jarrow, in particular as revealed in the great illuminated Bible made there: the Codex Amiatinus. Studying the temple in Bede's works reveals not just an individual genius, but a monastic community engaged actively in scriptural interpretation and religious reflection. O'Brien makes an important contribution to our understanding of early Anglo-Saxon England's most important author, the world in which he lived, and the processes that inspired his work.

Over the course of the early Middle Ages, Christianity changed politics and politics changed Christianity. Christianity emerged in the pagan Roman Empire and early Christians, consequently, developed a 'secular' understanding of politics, where the religious identity of their ruler was irrelevant; by the time the synthesis of early medieval Christianity was achieved in the ninth-century Carolingian Empire, however, a new model of 'Christian kingship' had emerged, linking the legitimacy of a ruler to the quality of their Christianity. Conor O'Brien traces the slow, complex, and only ever partial way in which the concept of 'Christian kingship' arose in the Latin West over the five centuries up to 840.Taking a comparative approach that is sensitive to regional variation and the interconnected nature of the post-imperial Latin West, the book presents a novel overview of the transformations of both religion and politics in the early Middle Ages. Drawing on recent anthropology and global history approaches to sacred kingship, it takes seriously both continuity and change over time to show how the relationship between early medieval Christianity and kingship was, above all, driven by people's search for good government. Christian kingship arose in societies where it proved a useful mechanism for addressing the relationship between the ruler and the ruled. In doing so, The Rise of Christian Kingship in the Early Medieval West provides not just a rich reconstruction, grounded in the primary evidence, of changes in political thought and practice in the early Middle Ages, but also contributes to wider historical discussions about secularity, sacred kingship and the relationship between politics and religion.