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Greetings I need to pick your brains fellow geeks = about castles.

I'm interested in finding some reading material on castles, specifically your standard western European castles, and would welcome any suggestions that you've got. Ideally in book format, though websites/youtubes are also good to recommend. Especially anything with mechanical discussions, technical drawings all the way through to historical accounts of sieges and storming the walls. From the ancient days of catapults all the way to the age of cannon (though with a stronger lean to the earlier days).

Castles are awesome, castles are my thing. I just spent £500 on plastic castle pieces.

That being said I cannot recommend a single good book to read. There are so many, however castle design was an art and tradition rather than science, until the Renaissance period, so you really don't need anything more than a childs book on the subject. I would recommend a book designed for children with clear graphics, this will not necessarily dumb down your education on castles.

This is the one I remember

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/847018.Castle

I had Castle, City and Pyramid by the same author, and while the building a pyramid book is based on conjecture all three books were well researched and very clearly illustrated so that you can map the construction clearly in your own mind and get a 3d image of the construction via your imagination. This was frankly what a medieval engineer had to work with rather than paper plans most of the time.

The fortification constructed in Castle is a fictitious building based on common 13th century architecture and is set as a castle build by King Edward I in Wales, which is a good choice of backdrop as the Welsh castles were very advanced for their time and based on earlier French castle building methods.

Now there was one definitive contemporary book on siege warfare though, though it covers a later black powder period. Sebastian Le Prestre De Vauban's seminal work on the mechanics of siege warfare called A Manual of Siegecraft and Fortification is a heavy but good read, based on reason and mathematics and new ideas on ballistics, concentration of force and battlefield probability.

I've got a Dan Snow book, "Battle Castles" that accompanied a TV show of the same name that he did and it is a very good and surprisingly in-depth examination of how different fortifications came to prominence and functioned technically.

There was an old Palladium book, Weapons and Castles. Doesn't give you much in reading but there were a fair few castle layouts and drawings. All western ones IIRC.

Andrew

"life in a medieval castle" was one of a series of medievalist books I remember from long ago, as being pretty nice resource.