An account of ten black people living in Tudor and Jacobean England as glimpsed mainly through parish and court archives. A glimpse is all we get but then that's true of most of the population at that time. The author is able to cite enough other records to show that the ten people she's chosen weren't the only ones even if they were a very, very small minority. It seems intuitively obvious that once England started interacting with the wider world that the traffic would not have been all one way but it is fascinating that the author can actually point to these people. ( )

I have read several outstanding books about everyday Tudor lives recently, and I'm delighted to add this one to my bookshelf. Solid and exhaustive research that makes excellent arguments not only for the presence of Africans in the everyday Tudor landscape but also their status as free persons who were ordinary members of the community. I also particularly love that each chapter is devoted to a person of a different social standing, so in addition to presenting the breadth of diversity in circumstances that the different subjects enjoyed, we also get a slice of many different sorts of Tudor lives.

Kaufmann also does an excellent job modeling how one researches very specific subjects, and how much information can (and cannot) be inferred from something as brief as a will or a baptismal record. Her contextualization of the information she presents is a real pleasure to read.

Advanced Reader's Copy provided by Edelweiss. ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed this book!
What little info I'm able to cross check is valid.
Perspective is white British but content is fascinating. ( )

Though the narrative gets lost in the weeds of Tudor history at times, this is a revealing piece in a body of work questioning assumptions on race in England. By focusing on ten Africans known to live in the country, Kaufman introduces evidence for hundreds more. The conclusion and author's note lay out the importance of this kind of work, and guide the readers to additional scholarship. Recommended. ( )

For most people, Black British history beings with the Windrush. Miranda Kaufmann's book shows that it extends much further back into history—not just into the earlier twentieth century, or even into the nineteenth, but into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There was a small but detectable population of people of African descent in Britain: west African royalty travelling to England for education, trumpeters at Scottish courts, divers and seamstresses and servants and sailors. They weren't slaves, but rather free people, who worked for others or owned their own small businesses; they were baptised into the Church of England and intermarried with English people. In both the big picture and the fine details, Kaufmann presents a history sure to undermine many assumptions about what the distant past looked like.

Black Tudors is not a set of conventional biographies. The book is as much about the contexts, the moment in history, within which these people lived as it is about them. As with the case with the vast majority of the inhabitants of early modern Britain, we have only scraps of knowledge about them and their lives. This may frustrate some readers, as may the fact that Kaufmann sometimes roams quite far from the subjects of her book. Despite that, however, this is still a fine, well-written book which adds appreciably to our knowledge of Britain's past. ( )