"Black Tudors The Untold Story Synopsis" Topic

"A Book of the Year for the Evening Standard and the Observer A black porter publicly whips a white Englishman in the hall of a Gloucestershire manor house. A Moroccan woman is baptised in a London church. Henry VIII dispatches a Mauritanian diver to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose. From long-forgotten records emerge the remarkable stories of Africans who lived free in Tudor England… They were present at some of the defining moments of the age. They were christened, married and buried by the Church. They were paid wages like any other Tudors. The untold stories of the Black Tudors, dazzlingly brought to life by Kaufmann, will transform how we see this most intriguing period of history….."
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Amicalement
Armand

No matter how much evidence is presented, someone will eventually come along and say that this is all propaganda by the "white" establishment.

Dan

I've seen raves about this book in a few places now, like Medievalists, and to be honest I just don't care that much. It's certainly interesting if one wants to take a look at the differences in the concept of race; there are cool places you can take this. That's probably the most interesting thing to me is that belong curiosity nobody seemed to care that the King had a black trumpeter, and that does say something about changes in the way people understand race, and I have to wonder why that would be. Maybe a matter of convenience for justifying later atrocities, sure, but maybe also a difference of a Morocan or North African here or there vs mass exposure.

I'm sure the scholarship is perfectly good, and that the book discusses something worthwhile. I can't say as I haven't read it. It just seems sometimes that people who half read books like this will use the premise to assail perceived issues with their favored ideological opponents in modern society. To me there's not a huge difference between European ultranationalists who try to paint Medieval and Early modern Europe as an unviolated monoculture to highlight ethnic interpretations of nationalism and those who try to make it more cosmopolitan and more tolerant than it actually was to lambast moderns for perceived racism.

As an aside, although these articles can be interesting, I feel like more and more posts linking to "relevant articles" are in fact linking to content which may in fact have some crossover appeal but doesn't much apply to wargaming. It feels like there were less of these a couple years ago.

3AcresAndTau: "linking to ‘relevant articles' are in fact linking to content which … doesn't much apply to wargaming."

Well, for one, you could use a different skin tone on a few select figures here and there. :)

Dan

Ha-Ha-Ha… good one Dany!…

Amicalement
Armand

One assumes that the studies authoress did find something beyond the countries or regions of origin of these people in order to be labeling them as 'black.'

A major portion if not most of the inhabitants of the two countries named are not 'black' unless by a racist definition based on a one drop or similar rule.

If the homework was properly done, then well and good. On the other hand if as I note above we have another 'Black Africa' tract.