If you read any histories of libraries or of the book (as a technology), you quickly will discover that the public lending libraries are relatively recent developments in human history. Prior to the past few hundred years, most collections were small by modern standards, and only specific groups of people typically had access to the books. We live in different times today, at least for now.

But indifference and neglect were the most dangerous foes to books, both way back then (whenever) and through to the current day. Dampness led to mold, insects led to decay, and a shortage of scribes inevitably meant that one generation’s books sometimes didn’t rise to the top of the next generation’s preservation priority list.

Those two paragraphs are my way of saying: use the relevant resources in your local libraries before they are culled from the shelves. In my private collection, large numbers of books on ancient and medieval history are marked “withdrawn” from the collections of public libraries, college libraries, and university libraries.

But in the United States, at least, if your address makes eligible for a library card in your local public library, you usually can get a library card to a local academic library, too, if you are fortunate enough to live near one. Such libraries spend millions of dollars on resources specifically intended to support creative activity and further scholarly research.

For writers of medievalist fiction, historical or realistic fantasy, the available riches are vast. You could start with The Cambridge Economic History of Europe. Its first volume is The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages. The chapters are packed with useful knowledge, but perhaps even more useful are the scholarly citations, which give you the authors and titles of literally hundreds of other sources. You frequently can pick up good sources for small sums of money at library sales or online sales of discarded monographs.

The New Cambridge Medieval History is a multi-volume achievement of historical research. Volumes III through V cover the period of medieval history most frequently favored by medievalist writers. If you like early periods of history, you also could benefit from spending some time inside The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World.

Good academic library often have copies of medieval topical dictionaries and other types of focused reference works.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that you can keep these books alive (i.e., available on the shelves) simply by checking them out and using them.

Note #1 (2/10/25): My feature image is the back inside cover of my copy of Michael E. Mallett’s The Florentine Galleys in the Fifteenth Century, a fascinating book culled from the collection of a major midwestern university.