Pimpin'!
For all you writers researching medieval and Renaissance France, the book I pimped a few months is available!
Paris in the Middle Ages, by Simone Roux.
(That's the Amazon link. Abebooks only seemed to link to it available in Germany (though still our English edition), so I don't know what's up with that.)
Aaaaanyway, it's a slightly dry book, but as a source of primary research material, it's awesome! The author is French (this is a translation edition), and read all the primary material and distilled it in a straightforward fashion. It's an excellent worldbuilding source for anyone creating a cosmopolitan city in a medieval or Renaissance sort of setting.
Here, the product description:
"Paris in the Middle Ages was home to royalty, mountebanks, Knights Templar, merchants, prostitutes, and canons. Bursting outward from the encompassing wall, it was Europe's largest, most cosmopolitan city. Simone Roux chronicles the lives of Parisians over the course of a dozen generations as Paris grew from a military stronghold after the Battle of Bouvines in 1214 to a city recovering from the Black Death of the 1390s. Centering on the streets of this metropolis, Roux peers into the private lives of people within their homes as well as the public world of affairs and entertainments, filling the pages of her book with laborers, shopkeepers, magistrates, thieves, and prelates. She examines the varied populations living within their own realms but sharing those streets: the Latin Quarter, where the university dominated; the precincts of Notre Dame, with its large number of clerical inhabitants; the mercantile world of the Right Bank; and the royal palace of the Louvre, with its attendant palaces for the king's satellites. She breathes life into dusty documents by explicating the lingo of street insults, making sense of patron saints--Sebastian, who was riddled with arrows, became the patron saint of tapestry workers--and entering the courtrooms and confessionals to tell how people actually ate, slept, dressed, fought, worked, and worshipped in the later Middle Ages."
As I say, it's a scholarly book, so somewhat dry (the translation has a tendency to longer sentences, probably from not wanting to hack the French syntax too much), but the author has an obvious love for the material, and it is just packed--PACKED, I say!--with detail on every page. It's also very well organized, so you can look up particular aspects in the TOC and turn to the pages you need.
Here endeth the pitch.