Bathilda Bagshot

Bathilda Bagshot is identified as the author of A History of Magic, a work cited as a historical source in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. The reference gives her a role as a chronicler of wizarding history: her book supplies context for the past concealment of magical creatures and is recommended for a fuller account of that period.

Historical Authority

When the guide turns to the historical relationship between Muggles and magical creatures, it invokes Bathilda Bagshot’s A History of Magic. The work is presented as a source readers can consult for more detail on a particularly bloody period in wizarding history, connecting her name with the historical record behind the guide’s account of concealment.

Her book is cited in connection with the effort to hide magical beasts from Muggles, an effort intended to foster the belief that such creatures had never existed. The guide places this history within a broader institutional and international framework: in 1750, Clause 73 was inserted into the International Code of Wizarding Secrecy, making wizarding governing bodies responsible for concealing, caring for, and controlling magical beasts, beings, and spirits in their jurisdictions. The citation to Bagshot’s history thus points beyond isolated sightings toward a sustained policy of secrecy.

A Historian Among the Guide’s Sources

The guide uses Bagshot as a named authority rather than presenting her as a participant in the events it describes. It directs readers interested in the especially bloody history to her book, published by Little Red Books in 1947. That bibliographic detail gives the recommendation the form of a reference-work cross-reference and situates A History of Magic as a separate, fuller account.

This brief citation defines the extent of what the guide says about Bagshot herself: it establishes her authorship and the historical subject for which her work is recommended, but supplies no personal biography or account of her involvement in wizarding affairs. Her significance here lies in the documentary framework of the guide, where a specialist history stands behind its compressed explanation of how magical creatures came to be hidden from Muggles.