Thursday Reading and Recommendations is intended as bookish free-for-all, for the discussion and recommendation of all books historical, or tangentially so. Suggested topics include, but are by no means limited to:
Regular participants in the Thursday threads should just keep doing what they've been doing; newcomers should take notice that this thread is meant for open discussion of history and books, not just anything you like -- we'll have a thread on Friday for that, as usual.
I don't have a full review this week but I did read something! I read A Soldiers' Chronicle of the Hundred Years War
College of Arms Manuscript M 9 by Anne Curry and Rémy Ambühl, but I got a free review copy so I owe my review to the journal History instead of my blog/here. I can talk a little about my experience with the book.
It's a very impressive edition of a somewhat obscure medieval chronicle that covers approximately 1415-1429, focusing mostly on English conquests in Normandy and Maine. The chronicle is noteworthy for having some unique details about those conquests and because it had quite a profound influence on some very popular Tudor histories. This book is more than just an edition of the chronicle (although you do get it in both original French and translated English) and it includes chapters on the complex authorship of the work, the work's attitude towards warfare (spoilers: the authors hated gunpowder weapons), as well as more unusual inclusions in a book like this such as an analysis of the style of French it was written in (which went a little over my head tbh), and two chapters on the Tudor legacy of the text.
What was really impressive, though, was in how the authors handled the long lists of names that make up large parts of the text. The text has tons of names in it, like just lists of soldiers who fought at a battle or captains in charge of a long list of garrison, and on their own these would be pretty boring to read. However, this work is part of the longer research program into the prosopography of medieval soldiers (I wrote about that in my review last week, readable here: https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/the-agincourt-retinues-of-the-dukes) and so where possible (and it's possible in a lot of cases) the authors have provided commentaries and even short biographies on most of the names listed in the chronicle. This is really impressive and must have taken forever!
All that having been said, A Soldiers' Chronicle retails for £90 new and is fairly esoteric and niche in its contents. I really enjoyed reading it, but I don't think I'd recommend it. If it's already in your exact niche research area than you already know about it, if it's not then there are plenty of other (cheaper) books I'd recommend instead.
The AskHistorians book list doesn't have anything on Shinto (at least, nothing described as being about Shinto) - what are some good English-language books about Shinto? What are their pros and cons?
Does anyone have recommendations for accessing anarchist periodicals from the 1890s online? I'm writing a paper on the Homestead Strike of 1892 and am struggling to come across material that represents anarchist perspectives. Have found copies of the Egoist and Benjamin Tucker's Liberty on HathiTrust and am familiar with Berkman's autobiography and Goldman's writings, but beyond that have been coming up short!
I could just be blind, but I can't see much under the women's history tab for the Booklist about pre-feudal/ classical Europe. Any recommendations on who I should read for this? I'd also be interested in other civilisations but I think that for brevity's sake, I'm going to keep the piece of work I want them for within the confines of Europe. I'd actually also like to read about prehistorical gender relations if you have anything on those but I'm not sure whether I'll include that or not.
"The Dawn of Everything" made me really interested in the intellectual exchange between Native Americans and Europeans, and I'd love to find other work on it that's more, um, grounded.
I'm going to look through the bibliography but it's frankly huge and won't include any popular treatments of the topic at all. So I'd love to get recommendations here too. Thanks!
I’m interested in reading a general history of colonialism and/or decolonization around the world (not just in any one country/region). I’d prefer something fairly readable but I’m not afraid of complexity or scholarly apparatus (I have a non-history humanities PhD). Thanks!
I’ve been reading From Colony to Superpower, and Herring’s sporadic treatments of U.S.-Latin American relations have really captivated me. Could anyone recommend an overview on the subject? A more recent work that covers post-Cold War relations is preferred but not necessary. Also, I would be more interested in a general history than one that focuses strictly on U.S. imperial activity.
I'm looking for something about Italian culinary history, how Italian cuisine has evolved over the centuries and maybe something about Italian-American food as well.