By request here is my examination of Albus Dumbledore and some of his actions and possible motivations thereof.

This essay is quite long so I have broken it up into multiple parts so please bear with me. Also, these are just my interpretations of events as portrayed in the books. They are just my opinions, I respect the fact that many absolutely ( Read more... )

Hogwarts castle was not built by the founders, nor was it originally built to house a school. Castle building technology did not arrive in Britain until after the Norman Conquest in 1066. The founders most likely set up their “school” in a large town called Hogwarts, which had already existed in one form or another for millennia.

Hogwarts ( Read more... )

Hogwarts did not appear fully form out of the founders’ shared vision; it evolved slowly over the centuries to the recognisable school in the Harry Potter books.

The modern version of Hogwarts is a post-industrial concept of education, where children are organised by age and progress in a linear fashion through distinct phases of learning. It is ( Read more... )

We have seen that the demographics of the wizarding world resembles pre-industrial Britain between the late middle ages and the early modern period. I have discussed the burden of infectious diseases on wizarding society but traditionally disease is not the only problem facing pre-industrial societies.

Where death stalks the land, it does so in the ( Read more... )

Exploring:

• Infant mortality in the wizarding world and why there is so little evidence for it
• How wizarding society functions
• Why having a large family is beneficial
• Why wizards/witches may have a very different attitude to family planning

In previous essays, I have explored how infectious disease can create high death rates in wizarding society. This ( Read more... )

A discussion of

• Purely magical diseases
• Ways in which infections can jump from magical creatures to wizards
• How the magical world controls the spread to muggles
• Why the magical world doesn't use modern medical techniques

In the previous essay I discussed how diseases contributes to the high death rate in the wizarding world and how the magical world ( Read more... )

High death rates in pre-industrialised countries reflect a large disease burden. Mostly this disease burden is due to infectious diseases that are endemic and also circulated as frequent, regular epidemics. With modern medical care, developed nations like Britain have managed to cut both the disease burden and death rate from infectious diseases ( Read more... )

Throughout human history the demographics of our societies has changed as we have developed. Today different societies are at different points along this demographic transition. For example developed nations like Japan and the UK, typically have a low birthrate and long life expectancy making children only a small proportion of the population, ( Read more... )

Defining Killing(a) Intent to kill, mens rea in the law, literally the guilty mind. To establish whether a homicide is unlawful the intent of the killer has to be determined. The difficult part of this is that there is guilty intent in an attempt also, as well as in secondary offenders, but I'll keep it as simple as possible. Lord Voldemort is ( Read more... )

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