Looking for recommendations from Italianists: for the middle ages, we always hear about the big Tuscan names Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, sometimes Machiavelli--what are some other people writing in Italian in the middle ages you'd recommend to someone new to it?

Christine de Pizan doesn't count, she wrote in French!

Finished up Hamilton and Jefferson: The Rivalry That Forged a Nation. It's...what it is: a dual biography that doesn't really concern itself too much with their differences until it's more than halfway done. It's helpful to me because most of what I've read about Hamilton has been in the recent hagiographic wave and Ferling is definitely not part of that. He admits right out that he's a Jefferson partisan who warmed to Hamilton a little while studying the guy but remains in Camp TJ. The Hamilton half of the book seemed relatively fair.

The Jefferson half is probably overgenerous. Ferling mentions slavery only begrudgingly. He never inquires as to how it is that the Republicans ended up with such a marked Southern bent or much into why the Federalists didn't do well in the section, a missed opportunity that I didn't expect in such a recent book. Ferling doesn't go full Founders Chic in fluffing either subject as the greatest of great men, but his treatment of them (more Jefferson than Hamilton) as more in the mode of disinterested philosopher statesmen is disappointingly traditional. Much of the book felt like a greatly expanded but not substantively different version of the high school survey on the 1790s. That made it kind of a slog.

Since I've finished that, I decided to finally take that brief break I've promised myself for about five months and read fiction: The Lies of Locke Lamora. It's funny so far.

I've been reading The Language of Space in Court Performance, 1400-1625 by Janette Dillon. The book is organized around court spectacles (e.g. coronations, the court progress, tournaments, trials and executions, etc.) and draws upon the principles of kinesics (movement) and proxemics (spatial organization and relative distances) to study these spectacles, which allows her to tease out how control over ritual movements and arrangements of people in a space can generate and reinforce power. It's a fascinating read!

Has anyone read David Armitage's Civil Wars: A History in Ideas? Any thoughts?

Reading through "MITI and the Japanese economic miracle". It certainly has some interesting ideas, although I think it sometimes overstates it's case. Reading has got me more interested in postwar Japan though. Does anyone know of any good books which cover the political/ diplomatic history of Cold War Era Japan?

I've been on a WW1 binge lately and I just picked up a copy of Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel. I really love the idea of reading contemporary accounts of soldiers' war experiences (diaries, memoirs and the like) but the introduction mentions it was written two years after the war and underwent several editions.

I just wanted to ask anyone who has experience in the field is Jünger's book a good/truthful historical source on what daily life was like in the trenches (in a tiny sliver of the flanders sector of course), or is it like Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, and is more valuable as literature, an atmospheric kind of take on the war?

If Jünger isn't good for this can anyone suggest a good replacement?

After several months I finally finished Alfred J. Rieber's Stalin and the Struggle for Supremacy in Eurasia. As noted in the introduction, it was effectively a sequel his previous book, The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War. It promotes the idea of what Rieber calls the "borderland thesis," which saw Stalin lead Soviet foreign policy to secure their immediate borders on all angles to protect the Soviet Union from foreign intervention.

However it was a very dry read, and this is the reason it took months for me to get through it; I just couldn't handle reading it. I lost interest quickly, in part because the description provided on Amazon (which caused me to buy it in the first place) is quite misleading and not accurate at all. It does provide some good information, and is comprehensive in that it doesn't just focus on the European theatre, but deals quite a bit with what happened in Asia regarding the Chinese and Japanese. But it's written in a way that makes it a hard read, and that really detracts from the overall message.

Bouncing back to the literary world recently, I'm reading something that I really should have read years ago, The Divine Comedy. Definitely a big checkmark on the "I'll feel sorta-legit as a Medievalist once I finish all of these" list. Looking forward to the day when my Italian is good enough to read the original.