Good medieval read

Just finished H Skoda, Medieval Violence: physical brutality in northern France 1270-1330 (Oxford, 2013), which I came upon by chance in the ‘France’ section of the university library. An excellent book which manages to be intellectually sophisticated without showing off. I seem to have read far too many articles and books which are a bit too desperate to attract attention by over-simplified revisionist readings of bodies of medieval evidence. This, though, is thoroughly grounded in high quality archival research and manages to say a number of things which are both thought-provoking and wise. Also contains a particularly creative homicide by quicksilver which is a gift for writers of medieval murder mysteries.