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What are some really good and detailed history books, maybe about Roman times and medieval times? I'm currently reading pic related but it only covered one specific subject and set closer to Victorian era.
>>8154177
The Thirty Years War by C.V. Wedgwood.
Is 500 pages nearly enough to cover that clusterfuck of a war? No, but still a great read.
>>8154177
You could try the ones that trace commodities over time. Or trade routes like the silk road.
Quinine by Fiammetta Rocco for instance traces malaria and its treatment from Rome as a papal state, through colonization in South American, and protestant rejection of the medicine through the Reformation as a Jesuit cure, up to Nazis trying to blockade it, and current medical treatment in Africa.
If you want something specific to Roman and medieval times, you might want to narrow down what kind of history you want.
Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is very good, for instance, but if you want a history of the early Republic, it's not going to do shit for you.
>>8154232
General history is okay to me.
Though I'm fairly interested in religions' involvements in transitioning the Roman times to medieval times, as well changes in society.
Books about the battles, famous war generals during both eras, crusades, the Black Death are also fine.
>>8154258
> religions' involvements in transitioning the Roman times to medieval times
You want Peter Brown.
The man more or less invented the idea of "Late Antiquity" as something other than a sub-field of Classics or Mediaeval Studies.
His work is the very definition of academic rigour, but his writing is lucid and typically shot through with wit, gentle humour and a magisterial command of the source material.
Best place to start is his "The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750" (1971). An extended essay designed to be approachable to secondary and undergraduate students, the whole thing is less than 200 pages and very well written. My personal copy's a Thames&Hudson reprint from 1993, and is really well illustrated.
After that, my favourite is "The Body and Society" (1988), which takes on the question of sexual renunciation in the early Church, and the different philosophical approaches to it adopted by the Latin, Greek, Coptic and Syriac traditions. It opens with a chapter on sexuality and the concept of the family in pagan Rome, which is well worth a read even if you skip the rest of the book, but it's hard to put down.
His name was made on a 1967 eponymous biography of St. Augustine of Hippo, and his most recent book, "Through the eye of a Needle" (2012), is about ideas of wealth, poverty and charity in the LA Roman world. They're both 700+ page monster times, and I haven't gotten round to either, but I've heard nothing but good things from those who have.
>>8155631
Awesome, I will check them out thanks.
