Reddit reviews Arms & Armor of the Medieval Knight: An Illustrated History of Weaponry in the Middle Ages

This is a good question! We have some recommendations in the booklist. I'll just copy them here and expand on them a bit plus add a few.

• Blair, Claude European armour, circa 1066 to circa 1700 London: Batsford, 1958. The best overview of European armour from 1066-1700, with a particular emphasis on the development of plate armour. It is primarily a descriptive history of armour's form. Though it is 60 years old, it's still the standard general history on the topic, and hasn't been surpassed. This book should be available via interlibrary loan from a public library or academic library or on the shelves in many academic libraries.
  
  
• Williams, Alan The knight and the blast furnace : a history of the metallurgy of armour in the Middle Ages & the early modern period Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2003. A detailed metallurgical analysis of hundreds of surviving pieces of plate armour. It also includes historical sketches of the armour industry in different cities, accounts of medieval and early modern steelmaking and a final chapter evaluating the effectiveness of armour. This is hard to get ahold of - my copy was $350 and one of the best purchases I ever made. For getting a loaned copy you'll need academic library access or to go in person to some place like the US Library of Congress.
  
  
• Pfaffenbichler, Matthias - Armourers - this is a great one-volume overview of the armour industry. Not much about the armour itself, but a lot about the people who made it.
  
  
• Edge and Paddock, Arms and Armour of the Medieval Knight - not as thorough as Blair, but easier to get ahold of and with more pictures, this is another decent intro to armour. It's organized in a way that's a bit maddening for reference, but there's a lot of information here.
  
  
• LaRocca, Donald How to Read European Armour - this is a different sort of introduction, that gives you an introduction to armour as an object and gives you a guide to looking at it critically in settings like Museums. Includes a lot of great information about what armour -is-, though it isn't really a history of armour per se.

This article, which cites numerous sources, goes into detail of the history of mail armor, including referencing its limited protection from blunt trauma.

>Finally, the following passage written by Galbert of Bruges describes a formidable archer named Benkin and demonstrates that while mail might protect the wearer from being pierced with arrows, it did not necessarily save him from blunt trauma: "And when he [Benkin] was aiming at the besiegers, his drawing on the bow was identified by everyone because he would either cause grave injury to the unarmed or put to flight those who were armed, whom his shots stupefied and stunned, even if they did not wound."

Another section also references the same:

>Even against mail-clad opponents the sword could inflict injury by striking at areas that were not covered with mail (such as the face) or through the infliction of blunt trauma. Because mail is flexible, it does not stop the impact of a blow. Some of the force of an attack is carried through the mail and padding to the wearer underneath. The wearer is especially vulnerable to attacks against hard, exposed body parts including the shin, knee, elbow, shoulder, clavicle, and skull.

> "Such weapons of percussion were especially effective against mail armour; repeated blows could shatter bones and kill the victim without even breaking a single riveted link of his hauberk. In this situation the flexibility of mail, an advantage in other respects, was a positive disadvantage."

The entire article is actually very interesting, and cites numerous sources for both the quotes and independent scientific verification of many of the claims. I also suggest this book for further reading. Sadly, I no longer have a copy, but I used to love that book back in high school.

There's a ton of books dealing with western battle tactics of any given period, and for the most part they're pretty shallow. The few i've read were pretty basic and offered the type of 'fun fact' and misinformation you get from the history channel.

A good balance of in-depth analysis without being too drawl is Carnage and Culture by Victor David Hanson. Bonus points for being cheap! Hanson's sort of an asshole and takes a pretty controversial, albeit well supported, stance in this book by claiming that Western cultures are inherently efficient at killing people and the most brutal of all conflicts occur when west meets west. To make his point, Hanson illustrates 10 or so different battles wherein westerners meet non-westerners, usually with overwhelmingly bad odds, and emerge victoriously. It's not focused in any one time period, but spans from 400BCE to WWII, if i recall correctly.

Specifically for the middle ages, i really enjoyed Arms and Armor of the Medieval Knight by David Edge and John Miles. It's more of an introduction to armor and weaponry and explains why certain styles developed to defend from evolving battle tactics. It's out of print and sort of a pain in the ass to find, though.