Dr. Miranda Kaufmann
Historian of the Black Tudors
Dr. Miranda Kaufmann is a British historian, author, educator, and journalist whose research has helped restore Africans to the documented history of Tudor and early Stuart England.
She studied history at Christ Church, Oxford, and completed a doctoral thesis titled “Africans in Britain, 1500–1640.” Through archival records, parish registers, court documents, household accounts, and other primary sources, Kaufmann identified evidence of more than 360 Africans living in Renaissance Britain. (Black British History)
Her best-known book, Black Tudors: The Untold Story, was published in 2017. The book reconstructs the lives of Africans who lived and worked in sixteenth-century England, including musicians, sailors, craftspeople, servants, divers, and independent residents. It was shortlisted for both the Wolfson History Prize and the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize. (MIRANDA KAUFMANN)
Among the historical figures examined in her work are:
• John Blanke, a Black trumpeter who served at the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII.
• Jacques Francis, an African salvage diver involved in recovering equipment from the wreck of the Mary Rose.
• Mary Fillis, a Moroccan-born woman who lived in Elizabethan London.
• Diego, an African sailor who accompanied Sir Francis Drake.
• Reasonable Blackman, a silk weaver who lived with his family in London.
Kaufmann’s scholarship challenges the widespread assumption that Black people were absent from Tudor England or that every African living there was enslaved. Her research shows that Africans were present in English communities, earned wages, joined churches, testified in courts, married, raised families, and participated in the economic and social life of the period. (MIRANDA KAUFMANN)
She has also worked with the BBC, the National Trust, English Heritage, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. Her educational projects have helped introduce Black Tudor history into classrooms and public-history programs. (MIRANDA KAUFMANN)
DTOA Legacy Statement
Dr. Miranda Kaufmann did not invent a Black presence in Tudor England.
She found the records that history had ignored.
Through disciplined archival research, she recovered the names and experiences of Africans who lived in Britain centuries before the modern era.
Her work reminds us that Black history is not separate from European history.
It is part of the historical record—documented, recoverable, and impossible to erase.