One Thousand Magical Herbs and Beasts: Medieval Elements in the Harry Potter Saga

The article is a reading of the four volumes of the Harry Potter saga; starting by recent critical interpretation that have seen in Rowling’s books a re-interpretation of age-old myths, such as the Cinderella story, I have explored the relation of these texts with the tradition from which they descend. The main focus of my work is upon the medieval or pseudo-medieval elements in Rowling’s stories, that is, both those elements that derive from an established medieval tradition (bestiaries, etc.) and those that have come to us as “medieval” but rather belong to an image of medievalism built by literary tradition; in the latter case, Rowling’s immediate predecessors are also those writers with whom she is most frequently compared, that is, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. The article thus proposes also an analysis of the debt Rowling has with her illustrious predecessors, and an assessment of her position in the canon of children’s literature in English.