Reddit reviews The Knight and the Blast Furnace: A History of the Metallurgy of Armour in the Middle Ages & the Early Modern Period (History of Warfare, 12)

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.

Crouch's book is more popular than specialist history. £60 is at the lower end of the academic price bracket, when the specialism is immense and audience is tiny the price rises sharply.

Lol, sorry for the unsolicited infodump! I mean, I could see that you were writing "realistic" in scare-quotes and said it might be "almost" viable, so I didn't really think you believed munitions armor was like tinfoil, I just kind of got carried away in correcting any misconceptions that any third party reading this might have. I swear, I'm such a hopeless windbag that it's harder for me to write 200 words than 10,000. XP

As for my sources, I was an intern in the department of arms and armor at a major museum for two years, and in addition to looking at all the stuff on display I have read some good material in books and online. I also learned a smidgen of armor-making while I was in college.

If you haven't seen it already, a very good introduction to medieval armor in general is Mike Loades' [Weapons that Made Britain] (https://youtu.be/7qHpoeYyfl0) episode on armor. I recommend Tobias Capwell, who's written [Masterpieces of Arms and Armour in the Wallace Collection] (https://www.amazon.com/Masterpieces-European-Armour-Wallace-Collection/dp/0900785861) and [Armour of the English Knight, 1400-1450] (http://www.wallacecollection.org/shop/books/specialist-books/armour-of-the-english-knight-1400-1450-by-tobias-capwell). You can see him in some TV programs such as [Metalworks: The Knight's Tale] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYd9_vUn7-E), and this recording of his lecture "[Building Medieval Plate Armour: An Operator's Guide] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COAIQPsgZWY)".

Getting into the more detailed stuff, Dr. Alan Williams is the leading expert on the metallurgy and hardening of European arms and Armor; he's written some books including [The Knight and the Blast Furnace] (https://www.amazon.com/Knight-Blast-Furnace-History-Metallurgy/dp/9004124985), and he often appears in other stuff such as the TV documentary [Secrets of the Viking Sword] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTlmrAh1oHI). [Knyght Errant] (https://www.youtube.com/user/neosonic66) is the YouTube channel of Ian LaSpina, who does very detail-oriented videos about the construction and ergonomics of late medieval armor. This French video, "[Le combat en armure au XVe siècle] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hlIUrd7d1Q)", is kind of a demo reel of techniques for fighting in armor. More detailed videos about fighting in armor come from "[Pursing the Knightly Arts] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw7PPvXKlz0)" and Dierk Hagedorn's [Hammaborg class] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S_Q3CGqZmg) on the subject. If you wanna see how reproduction armor is made, check out [Eric Dubé] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Gvuo5Xmcp0) and [Jeffrey Wasson] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgzQiO9liNw) on TouTube. Check out Matt Easton's [Scholagladiatoria] (https://www.youtube.com/user/scholagladiatoria) videos too.

Hot damn, his website is just like the Vickers. Obsolete, functional, and bulletproof.

That's not a bad idea...I shall have to do so when I've got a few hundo for a reference book. Though, with out of print stuff it's not getting any cheaper...


Case in point: The Knight and the Blast Furnace, there was no way I was paying $500 for a copy. It is one of the gold-standard reference texts for the development, methodology, and metallurgy behind medieval maille and plate. Really wanted to have it back when I was making elbow cops and assembling vambraces for a guy that sold armor to SCA and ARMA dorks. Was unable to locate it and had to go without. Recently found a pdf, it's such a good read.