I'm a bit pressed for time, so I'll keep this brief: The Crossbow, by Mike Loades, is the single most valuable book ever published by Osprey and you need to have a copy if you study medieval warfare. It relies on the best available English language sources and blends them with experimental archaeology to provide an easily accessible guide to the design, performance, operation and use of crossbows in medieval Europe, with some brief and informative digressions into Chinese and Islamic usages.

My only comment is that I wish the book had been double the length and that Loades was fluent in German. That would have made for pretty much the definitive guide to the crossbow but, even so, he has still done an incredible job.

While the quality of Osprey books varies, some are just plain awful and should no longer be sold. Medieval European Armies is about 50% dead wrong and 25% distorted. That it was published in 1975 is no excuse, because it get things like the existence of serjeantry in England (which the book claimed never existed) wrong, despite it being discussed several times by Meyrick, whose books they looted for illustrations. It is a terrible book and Osprey should be ashamed that they not only still sell physical copies of it, but have made it available digitally as well.

So, I've heard this is the go-to place for reading and book recommendations.

I asked a question recently about rationality and its history and decided to read How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind. On third chapter right now and enjoying it a lot, but I wish there was more on pre-Cold War rationality/reason, which I think the book somewhat skims over. I found that one of the other authors wrote a book on Game Theory and I had heard of S. M. Amadae's work, but all of them seem to be treating social scientific accounts of rationality that developed within the past 60 odd years.

Would anyone be able to recommend a book that discusses the history of rationality/reason from prior to game theory?