Excellent bio of Surrey, jerk, pioneering poet, and son of one of the ghastlier Dukes of Norfolk, not that that narrows it down.
Really good on sense Excellent bio of Surrey, jerk, pioneering poet, and son of one of the ghastlier Dukes of Norfolk, not that that narrows it down.
Really good on sense of place and time and personality, and the fear and paranoia of Henry VIII's court. Excellent writing, lively and engaging, and the parts about Surrey's poetry are fascinating. How historical biography should be done. ...more
What an extraordinary, revelatory book. The author has gone through the minutiae of parish registers and legal records to reconstruct the stories of AWhat an extraordinary, revelatory book. The author has gone through the minutiae of parish registers and legal records to reconstruct the stories of Africans living in Tudor England, on the way revealing just how many there were. It's a staggering demonstration of how much history has been whitewashed. The author puts each of the stories she's dug out into a wider context of the time (skilled artisans, pirates, prostitutes, musicians at the royal court, divers; city people and country people; settlers and just visiting) and shows how much international travel and immigration, forced and voluntary, was going on. Obviously the historical record is sparse--most people have disappeared altogether, six centuries on, so the number of lives Kaufmann has managed to dig out are probably only a fraction of the whole--but this is a really impressive attempt at recreating a world that hasn't just vanished but been deliberately whitewashed away.
Fantastic stuff. Inevitably there's a lot of grimness here--racism, the beginnings of the slave trade--but there's also glimpses of a world that was just busily getting on, with immigrants of all sorts fitting in to society and becoming part of its ebb and flow.
I read this in e so I didn't get full value from the illustrations; also if you get it in hardback you could use it to hit people who think England's past is monochrome. A really good and necessary book. ...more
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