Black Tudors - BookWyrm

paperback, 384 pages

Published Nov. 13, 2018 by Oneworld Publications.

ISBN:: 978-1-78607-396-9

(1 review)

A black porter publicly whips a white English gentleman in a Gloucestershire manor house. A heavily pregnant African woman is abandoned on an Indonesian island by Sir Francis Drake. A Mauritanian diver is despatched to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose... Miranda Kaufmann reveals the absorbing stories of some of the Africans who lived free in Tudor England. From long-forgotten records, remarkable characters emerge. They were baptised, married and buried by the Church of England. They were paid wages like any other Tudors. Their stories, brought viscerally to life by Kaufmann, provide unprecedented insights into how Africans came to be in Tudor England, what they did there and how they were treated. A ground-breaking, seminal work, Black Tudors challenges the accepted narrative that racial slavery was all but inevitable and forces us to re-examine the seventeenth century to determine what caused perceptions to change so radically.

2 editions

AudioProcessingDemogorgon reviewed Black Tudors by Miranda Kaufmann

Review of 'Black Tudors' on 'GoodReads'

4 stars

A book that I've passed several times, and I finally bit and borrowed it. It's extremely well researched, but as Shakespeare scholars know, so little survives from this time period that constructing coherent histories of individual people depends more than a good researcher would like upon leaps of imagination. Unfortunately, the leaps in this book are boring and don't stray far from legal documents. There are many individuals described in this book, but it lacks a coherent narrative or a revisionist twist, which makes it seem merely a pile of facts without a spirit to animate it. The four stars are for the research, though, which if boring is still vital and contributes to historical knowledge.