Hello everyone,
After a number of years of focusing almost exclusively on Classical Antiquity, I'm getting out there. An interest in Byzantium led me to the Crusades, and I just finished Tyerman's "God's War: A New History of the Crusades", which exposed how feeble is my knowledge of the political history of medieval Europe. I've decided that my next read will be Peter Wilson's history of the Holy Roman Empire "Heart of Europe", but thinking ahead, I'd want to know what are the go-to books for the general history of the French territories after the fall of the Carolingian Empire. I imagine there would be a lot of crossing with the history of other regions (and I certainly wouldn't be opposed to reading more than one book), so if you could give me some list that would cover, in one or more volumes, the Early to Late medieval history of those regions, I'd be very grateful. I did do some research, but surprisingly came up with nothing. Maybe I've been searching wrong, yet all I found were either 100 pages overviews of 500 years or else books on individual figures (Phillip the Fair, Richard I, etc), and I'd be looking for something in between, even if we're talking about heftier tomes.
The "regions" I'm interested in are
France
Burgundy
Aquitaine
etc
(England, either by itself or as a participant in the contest for France)
Thank you kindly.
I enjoyed Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror," which covers the 14th century with a particular focus on France. Take it with a grain of salt, though, for reason explained in this thread.
(Disclaimer that I don't study medieval France at all, so most of my knowledge of it comes from that one book.)