A Very Potter-esque Day

Being from one of the least typical Oxford colleges in terms of architecture, I love it when I get to have a chance to experience some of the very cool old buildings. Today was a great day, as I got to add two more Harry Potter sites to my list of Cool Things I've Seen In England.*

At about 1:30 I headed over to the Bodleian, which I don't usually get a chance to visit because foreign language folks usually work at the Taylorian instead. I had a date with a 16th century Vulgate Bible, to look up some Latin passages for my dissertation. (At the Bodleian you are not allowed to check out books. You can't even go look for them yourself - you have to fill out a request form online, and they go hunt it down in the miles and miles of storage and deliver it to a reading room.) So anyway, I asked for my lovely 16th century Vulgate Bible to be delivered to the Duke Humphrey Reading Room, which you may recognize as the Hogwarts Library:

I think it shows up the most deliberately in the first movie, when Harry and Ron and Hermione are looking up information about the Sorcerer's/Philosopher's Stone. I sat among the old books and looked up passages in my 16th century Vulgate Bible, and felt very authentic and Oxonian. It was cool. I have to go back tomorrow to look up a few more passages that I forgot about today.

On the way out of the library, I got to take a peek in the Divinity School, which is the site of the Hogwarts Infirmary in more than one episode of the series:

(I did not take either of these two photos, by the way.)

So after all this Potter excitement, I ate lunch in the Covered Market, which is not at all Potter-esque but still enjoyable. But after that, feeling very much like Hermione, I stopped by the Taylorian for "a bit of light reading":

Yes, I checked out this book. Yes, it is for my dissertation. It is the Concordancias de los Escritos de San Juan de la Cruz. When I asked if I could take it out, the librarian actually said, "Are you sure?" I guess I should be glad that I am doing San Juan and not Santa Teresa de Ávila...her Concordancias is twice as big!

So anyway, today has been productive and interesting. I should get back to writing now. Have a lovely day, folks!

Much love,
Me

*To refresh your memory, in addition to the two I saw today, the other Harry Potter sites have been:

• the stairs and dining hall at Christ Church, which inspired the Hogwarts stairs and dining hall;
• the cloisters at Magdalen College, which also appearted in several of the Harry Potter films;
• and King's Cross station, which is the home of Platform 9 and 3/4.