Goodreads Monday is a weekly meme where we randomly select a book from our Goodreads To Be Read list and share it with the world. It’s hosted by Lauren’s Page Turners, so be sure to link back to her site so that we can all see what everyone plans to read!

Black Tudors: The Untold Story
by Miranda Kaufmann
376 pages
Nonfiction/History
Published November 2017 by Oneworld Publications

From Goodreads: 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.

There’s a perception that European history is filled only with white people, as though, because it was harder to travel in the Medieval and Renaissance eras, people must not have traveled at all. But that’s not the truth at all, and it turns out that Europe’s history is more diverse than we think. Black Tudors tells the story of Black people who lived in England during the Tudor era, and it got a rave review from Simon at footnotes.and.tangents on Instagram a couple of months ago. It’s been on my radar ever since.