Meaux sits at the intersection of several significant chapters in French history — the great medieval church, the seventeenth-century age of eloquence, and the catastrophic opening of the First World War. The books below approach those themes from the literary side rather than the guidebook one.
The Sacred Cow by Henri Pourrat — not directly about Meaux but about the peasant farming culture of north-central France that produced Brie de Meaux and a dozen other great cheeses. Pourrat's affection for the landscape and the people who work it helps make sense of the weight that local cheese-making carries in a place like Meaux.
The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 by Alistair Horne — Verdun is two hundred kilometres east, but the Great War saturates this part of France, and Horne's account of that defining battle is the most readable English-language introduction to what the fighting cost. Read it before visiting the Musée de la Grande Guerre and the meaning of every object in the collection will sharpen considerably.
The Marne by Georges Blond — a narrative history of the First Battle of the Marne, fought on the plains and ridges north and east of Meaux in September 1914. Blond reconstructs the week of confused fighting that stopped the German advance on Paris, and the landscape he describes is the one you look out over from the American Monument.
Bossuet by Jacques Le Brun — a scholarly biography of Meaux's most famous bishop, available in French and in excerpts in English. Le Brun is good on Bossuet's relationship to royal power and on the particular quality of French religious oratory in the grand siècle. The palace and cathedral come alive differently once you have some sense of the man who occupied them.
A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Laurence Sterne — Sterne passed through this part of France in the 1760s and his digressive, affectionate account of travelling through provincial France before the Revolution captures a world not entirely different from the one you still encounter in the market towns of the Île-de-France. The cheese, the clergy, and the slow provincial rhythms he observes are all recognizable.