Items

Title: Culpeper's Star Thistle
Description: Over forty editions of the English apothecary Nicholas Culpeper's popular English Physician have been published since 1653, rendering it one of the most popular herbals ever in print. The Academy Library has many editions of this richly-detailed catalog of medicinal plants, including this expanded, hand-colored edition from 1818. Culpeper tells us that star thistle (upper left) grows wild in the fields around London in many places, and that the seeds and roots are efficacious as diuretics (at Hogwarts the plant is mentioned as a common Potions ingredient). Mulpepper's Apothecary in Diagon Alley provided many a wizard with potion ingredients; the shop's name is a nod to one of the most popular keepers of pharmaceutical knowledge in British history.
Collection: How to Pass Your O.W.L.s at Hogwarts: A Prep Course

Title: Manget's Alchemists
Description: This plate comes from an alchemical text called the Mutus Liber, or silent book, which was included in Jean-Jacques Manget's compilation, the 1702 Bibliotheca Curiosa (First-years, it's a far cry from the shrieking book in the school library's restricted section.) The image illustrates a sequence of laboratory operations to transmute baser metals into gold. Alchemical texts from the early eighteenth century and onward often show women working alongside men. The last panel of the image shows the alchemists shushing the reader, but they leave us with powerful wizarding wisdom: "Pray, read, read, read, reread, work and discover."
Collection: How to Pass Your O.W.L.s at Hogwarts: A Prep Course

Title: Nicolas Flamel's Hieroglyphicks
Description: Never trust a Chocolate Frog card: Nicolas Flamel, magician, is introduced via that medium to Harry and Ron on their inaugural ride to Hogwarts. Despite the interference of a less than helpful librarian—Madame Pince, for shame!-- Harry unearths Flamel's backstory as the maker of the philosopher's stone and beneficiary of the elixir of life, a mixture that keeps him 690 years young. The historical Nicolas Flamel had a similarly outsized reputation. The scribe and manuscript-seller married a wealthy widow and owned many properties, but probably never wrote alchemical texts, such as the one attributed to him on hieroglyphics.
Collection: How to Pass Your O.W.L.s at Hogwarts: A Prep Course

Title: Bezoar
Description: It's round, reddish, and a little bigger than a baseball, but think again if the only Hogwarts association you have is a Quaffle, the ball used in the wizarding world's beloved sport Quidditch. Die-hard Harry Potter fans may recognize this object as a bezoar—which means "protection from poison" in Persian, and refers to the stony mass in a ruminant animal’s stomach. Bezoars were used throughout Europe for medicinal purposes for centuries and were thought to have magical properties. In the wizarding world, bezoars were a key ingredient in the Antidote to Common Poisons. Our bezoar, pictured here, dates to 1862 and comes from the stomach of a cow.
Collection: How to Pass Your O.W.L.s at Hogwarts: A Prep Course

Title: Chubby's Magic Book
Description: Too bad the infant Dudley Dursley didn't get his Aunt Lily's magical abilities....this spellbinding babe is a dead ringer for Harry Potter's first cousin, minus his trademark scowl. Chubby's Magic Book, an advertising pamphlet for Fletcher's Castoria, administered to counteract indigestion, was one of many pamphlets produced by patent medicine manufacturers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also contains images printed in invisible ink. As Hermione might say, "Aparecium!"
Collection: How to Pass Your O.W.L.s at Hogwarts: A Prep Course

Title: American Witchcraft
Description: Aspiring Ministry of Magic officers enrolled in History of Magic may find this 1942 pamphlet indispensible in expanding their knowledge of American studies. On Halloween, the pamphlet tells us, "None of the devilment of this season is at all necessary, so one has the right to feel that 'witches' do live and cause all kinds of trouble: they rarely are caught." American witches and wizards, time to get out those invisibility cloaks!
Collection: How to Pass Your O.W.L.s at Hogwarts: A Prep Course

Title: della Porta's Natural Magic
Description: Possible History of Magic exam question: what happened when Giambattista della Porta, the author of this 1558 book on natural magic, was called a "Neapolitan sorcerer" by the French witch hunter Jean Bodin? Della Porta's book explained that some women accused of witchcraft may have used herbal lotions that contained hallucinogenic properties, prompting them to imagine they could fly. With a little luck, Flourish and Botts Bookseller may have a copy; you'll also find creative applications for mandrake and other medicinal plants in these pages.
Collection: How to Pass Your O.W.L.s at Hogwarts: A Prep Course

Title: Nash's Wolfsbane
Description: John Nash's intoxicating woodcuts have a distinctly modern feel, with leaves and blossoms fashioned in a bold contrast of dark and light. Nash classifies his plants as "deadly" (nightshade), "dangerous" (foxglove, thorn apple), and "suspect" (pasque flower, Bear's foot), though The Times Literary Supplement's 1928 review argues that these groupings are somewhat arbitrary. Wolfsbane (also known as Monk's Hood) is the most poisonous plant of the buttercup family. J.K. Rowling tells us that the plant could suppress violent impulses in werewolves if taken by the gobletful before a full moon.
Collection: How to Pass Your O.W.L.s at Hogwarts: A Prep Course

Title: Bentley's Black Hellebore
Description: "Deck the hall with boughs of black hellebore" hardly has a festive ring, but Robert Bentley's Medicinal Plants assures us that this plant that blooms in the bleak midwinter is commonly known as the Christmas Rose. Bentley reports that black hellebore has a slightly bitter taste and causes a tingling sensation on the tongue. In moderate doses, the plant was used to treat mania, melancholia, and epilepsy. It was also used as a medicine for domestic animals. In large amounts, though, it is poisonous. At Hogwarts, the plant's calming properties are utilized in Professor Snape's Potions class to make the Draught of Peace, but best to keep in mind Bentley's description and skip it at the Yule Ball.
Collection: How to Pass Your O.W.L.s at Hogwarts: A Prep Course

Title: Curtis' White Lily
Description: Founded in 1783, Curtis's Botanical Magazine is the longest-running botanical periodical with color illustrations of plants (Muggles can subscribe, as it's still in print). William Curtis describes the White Lily, lilium candidum, as "among the very oldest inhabitants of the flower-garden" and praises the flower for its stateliness, beauty, and exceptional powers. These qualities wouldn't have been lost on J.K. Rowling, who gave Harry's mother the same name. Elsewhere in her books, lilies are beloved by slugs, ghosts, and by the heads of Gryffindor and Slytherin: Minerva McGonegall and Severus Snape.
Collection: How to Pass Your O.W.L.s at Hogwarts: A Prep Course

Title: Fludd's Synopsis of the Divinatory Arts
Description: The English astrologer and mystic Robert Fludd was known for his writings about metaphysical knowledge and astrology, which he illustrated with startlingly-beautiful engravings. This image from the second volume of his masterwork, the Utriusque Cosmi (1619-1621), shows a wheel, with the Ape of Nature at the center, and man at the top. The wheel is divided into seven sections, all representing different kinds of divination, including prophecy, the art of memory, and palmistry. Young magicians studying up on this last divinatory science, take note: don't mix up the lines on your instructor's hand, or you may just predict she died the previous Tuesday, as Harry did.
Collection: How to Pass Your O.W.L.s at Hogwarts: A Prep Course

Title: Ketham's Zodiac Man
Description: "What's your sign?" seems the obvious question for this embattled gent, who has a zodiac sign hanging from every conceivable limb. The figure can be found in the Fasciculus Medicinae, a popular late-fifteenth-century compendium of medical treatises from Greek and Arabic medical texts that was published in many editions (we have five). Ketham's "Zodiac Man" embodies the medieval and early Renaissance belief that parts of the body were governed by astrological signs. The planets gave order to the seemingly random courses of health and illness. Your Divination lessons may not connect the dots so specifically from sign to body part, but we've heard tales of Hogwarts professors warning of Mars for fear of burns and accidents, and Saturn, for a diminutive stature.
Collection: How to Pass Your O.W.L.s at Hogwarts: A Prep Course

Title: Centaur Almanac
Description: For many nineteenth-century Americans, almanacs produced by patent medicine manufacturers were a trusted source of information, distributed annually by the local pharmacy. By the nineteenth century, many manufacturers produced almanacs with arresting designs featuring plants and animals in eye-catching colors. Pharmaceutical almanacs combined calendars, weather predictions, and horoscopes with advertisements and testimonials for products. This almanac, produced by Centaur Liniments, promoted a medication that promised to remedy a long list of ailments. Good leisure reading for that centaur colony near Hogwarts—within these pages they'd find predictions of the planets' brightest days, which could ease viewing through the thick cover of the Forbidden Forest's trees.
Collection: How to Pass Your O.W.L.s at Hogwarts: A Prep Course

Title: Two Dragons from Ambroise Paré
Description: Anatomist, surgeon, and inventor Ambroise Paré's collected works, first published in 1575, offer illustrations of many medical anomalies along with strange and exotic creatures. Among them, Paré singles out dragons, placing all bets on these fierce, fantastical creatures in theoretical battles with elephants and birds of prey. Paré writes, "Pliny saith, that there are Dragons found in Aethiopia of ten Cubits long, but that in India there are Dragons of an hundred foot long, that fly so high, that they fetch Birds, and take their prey even from the midst of the clouds." With such a range of species, we're happy Hagrid's egg hatched the Norwegian Ridgeback Norbert, who, despite some destructive tendencies, was a pretty swell guy.
Collection: How to Pass Your O.W.L.s at Hogwarts: A Prep Course

Title: Aldrovandi's Mer-Couple
Description: The classical tradition that attested to the realness of mermaids continued well into the seventeenth century, with sources like Ulisse Aldrovandi's Monstrorum historia documenting sightings of the creatures. Pliny also reported documentary evidence of Sirens, the beguiling mermaids who lured sailors with song to their deaths along the Nile (note the couple is called the Monstra Niliaca Parei). J.K. Rowling's colony of mer-people at the Black Lake use their voices to deliver a vital clue during the TriWizard Tournament.
Collection: How to Pass Your O.W.L.s at Hogwarts: A Prep Course

Title: Aldrovandi's Dragons
Description: Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) kept an impressive cabinet of curiosities that purportedly included a dragon specimen. When he died, he left his collection to the city of Bologna. The collection was later maintained by Bartolomeo Ambrosini, who published the naturalist's volume on serpents and dragons after Aldrovandi's death. Aldrovandi deliberately produced large-format books with spacious woodcuts, allowing him to render his subjects in the appropriate size according to their appearances in real life or in this case, stature. On the top is one of Aldrovandi's Ethiopian dragons, and below, a dragon modeled after Ambroise Paré's dragon, expanded for effect. We're sure Charlie Weasley would love to meet these fire-breathing fellows.
Collection: How to Pass Your O.W.L.s at Hogwarts: A Prep Course

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