The Baroque Poem: A Comparative Survey is one that I quite like, it’s written well and has beautiful illustrations, baroque literature gets largely overshadowed by baroque music and the visual arts, and I think that this is a nice introduction. There’s also Runciman’s A History of the Crusades, I don’t necessarily agree with his thesis — that the crusaders were a sort of spiritual continuation of the barbarian invasions of Rome — but it’s such an important work for the historiography of the Crusades, which was still very much of the noble battle to assist Eastern Christians (sack of Constantinople notwithstanding) and protect the Holy Land against the depredations of the Saracens sort when he wrote, and he’s such a beautiful and engaging writer, he makes extremely dense material so very easy to read.