Suggested Research Reading For Aspiring Fantasists

Part II: The Nonfiction Stuff...Or, In Quest of Real Toads For Your Imaginary Garden
Dorothy Hartley	Lost Country Life A wealth of information on life in rural, pre- to early-industrial England. (Want to know what tenterhooks really are? This'll tell you.) Food In England Tells you what is actually in all those big iron pots so deplored by Diana Wynne Jones.
Elizabeth David	English Bread and Yeast Cookery A truly scholarly cookbook. The entire first section is devoted to the history of grains, milling, yeasts, and breadbaking. Find out why Rumpelstiltskin said, "Today I brew, tomorrow I bake," and what is the relationship between bread and beer, anyway?
Harold McGee	On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen Tells you which fruits grew where and when, and why those, and how carrots used to be purple and why they turned orange, and what did the Romans really eat, and gets into the real science of it.
Margaret Visser	Much Depends On Dinner The Rituals of Dinner Two books on the history of food and dining, from an anthropological/ sociological perspective. (Cultures where the main cooking fat is olive oil are different in a lot of ways from those where the main cooking fat is butter: how and why? Stuff like that.)
Fernand Braudel	Read any or all of his big books on the renaissance and the development of modern capitalism. Here are a couple of titles: The Wheels of Commerce The Structures of Everyday Life
Bernard Grun	The Timetables of History for all the obvious reasons.
James Burke	Connections PBS series on the history of science and technology. Good for giving you an idea of what kinds of things existed together at what level of tech and why.
Terry Jones	The Crusades A four-part documentary series.
M.D. Warren D. Bowman, Reata Bitter (illustrator)	Outdoor Emergency Care: Comprehensive Care for Nonurban Settings For maiming your characters right, and for giving them plausible symptoms. It'll also tell you more about medicine than most physicians knew before the 20th century.
Paul Veyne	The History of Private Life Four volumes, full of good stuff. The past is another country sometimes, if not another planet; space aliens live there.
Eliot Wigginton (editor)	The Foxfire Books Oral histories of life in Appalachia, in times that weren't pre-industrial but in some ways might as well have been. The earlier volumes are especially recommended.
Nathaniel Bowditch	New American Practical Navigator Bowditch's book has been through multiple editions, keeping it up-to-date, but its historical section still contains instructions for older methods of navigation (using birds; using a backstaff; using an astrolabe; other weird stuff). If your character is going to sea, Bowditch will help you match the level of nautical tech to the rest of your setting.

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