Miranda Kaufmann

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.… (more)

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.… (more)