Agreed on The Discarded Image, it really is very good. I've read it together with Huizinga's The Autumn of the Middle Ages and they both provide fascinating insights into not just how people lived but more importantly what they thought. Medieval Europe is absolutely fascinating and it's great to be shown around by someone as erudite as Lewis and Huizinga.

If you liked The Discarded Image, Lewis's book on courtly love (The Allegory of Love) is also very good. Courtly love is such an inscrutable subject for moderns and I only wish more people wrote as intelligently on the subject as Lewis did, since everything from Petrarch's sonnets to the 16th century Madrigals and beyond are only intelligible if one possesses some understanding of how courtly love works. Now if only I have time to read through Gower like Lewis suggested...

I just saw your reply and just wanted to say I really appreciated your book recommendations! Now reading Huizinga :)

Fantastic to see Bob Allen mentioned here! The research group where I worked tended to be on the opposite side of debates to Prof. Allen, but he’s a skilled and influential historian of the British Industrial Revolution.

The last 10-20 years of research into the Industrial Revolution hasn’t had much impact on popular understanding. Hopefully books like the Very Short Introduction will change that.

> we get so many things wrong about what people before us thought and why

I see this a lot in engineering. Almost nobody takes the time to understand the work that came before them.