Hi All,
Inspired by RWN's series on Joan d'Arc and the Hundred Years War, I picked up a copy of Tuchman's 'A Distant Mirror' to learn more about the Late Middle Ages, an era of which I know almost nothing. Upon opening the front cover, and realizing that Tuchman was also the author of 'The Guns of August', I suddenly knew I was holding the wrong book. Looking back through a previous r/AskHistorians thread about the book in 2017, I noticed a general lament about the dearth of accessible modern texts that cover this period.
Have there been any publications in the field since then that are worth pursuing, or should I go pick up a copy of Huizinga?
I summarized some of relevant literature (overview work) list before in:
Either Lazzari's The Later Middle Ages (2021) in Short Oxford History of Europe or Briggs's undergraduate textbook, titled The Body Broken (linked to the review site) (2nd ed. 2020) is apparently seminal now.
Another problem is, however, that the writing style of these books mentioned in the linked thread above does not generally resemble Tuchman's or Huizinga's narratives.
As a readable kinda narrative style popular history, AH's Book list on European Middle Ages recommends John Kelly's The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time (2005/ 06), and I also generally chime for this one, though not all of its contents are still up-to-date.
This year [2022] James Belich has also published a book titled The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2022, it certainly includes the very detailed assessment on the Black Death in accordance with the newest research in the last decade, but it is apparently unfortunately not so readable for non-specialist first time reader as Kelly's classic one.