History books have painted a very white picture of Elizabethan England. Let’s challenge that narrative.
BLACK TUDORS by Miranda Kaufmann
Thursday November 27th at 8pm on Zoom
Our guest curator Cassandra Marcus Davey has put together an incredible list of resources to help you find copies of Black Tudors in various formats. Find it here: Fall Ruff Reads resources
DM us or contact christine@shakespeareintheruff.com for the Zoom link. (Don’t have time to read but still interested in the conversation? Join us anyway!)
From the publisher:
“[Black people] came to England from Africa, from Europe and from the Spanish Caribbean. They came with privateers, pirates, merchants, aristocrats, even kings and queens, and were accepted into Tudor society. They were baptised, married and buried by the Church of England and paid wages like other Tudors.
Yet their experience was extraordinary because, unlike the majority of Africans across the rest of the Atlantic world, in England they were free. They lived in a world where skin colour was less important than religion, class or talent: before the English became heavily involved in the slave trade, and before they founded their first surviving colony in the Americas. Their stories challenge the traditional narrative that racial slavery was inevitable and that it was imported to colonial Virginia from Tudor England. They force us to re-examine the 17th century to find out what had caused perceptions to change so radically.”
About Miranda Kaufmann:
Dr. Miranda Kaufmann is the author of the Wolfson History Prize and Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize-shortlisted book Black Tudors: The Untold Story (2017). She read History at Christ Church, Oxford and is now an Honorary Fellow of the University of Liverpool, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, where she co-convened the ‘What’s Happening in Black British History?’ workshop series from 2014 to 2022. She served as Lead Historian for the Colonial Countryside project collaborating with National Trust houses from 2019 to 2021; and has taken her work into schools with her Teaching Black Tudors project and to the world with her Black Tudors: The Untold Story course with FutureLearn. Her second book, Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery (2025), tells the stories of nine British women who inherited people and plantations in the Caribbean.