Mirrour of the Lyf of Ralph Stokesie

The Mirrour of the Lyf of Ralph Stokesie was written by the fifteenth-century magician William Thorpe and the fairy Col Tom Blue, who had been a servant of Ralph Stokesey.

The book was put up for sale when the library of the Duke of Roxburghe was auctioned off in the summer of 1812. Gilbert Norrell purchased the volume for 2,100 guineas.* The magical community anticipated that the seven magical texts sold at the auction would offer solutions to at least some of the many unanswered questions of English Magic, and had particular hopes that The Mirrour of the Lyf of Ralph Stokesie would provide substantial information. However, Norrell never published any of his findings from any of the seven volumes [28].

Notes

*. Astoundingly, this is not the highest price paid for a single volume at the auction of the Duke's library. A copy of the Valdarfer Boccaccio, the 1471 first edition of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron printed by Christopher Valdarfer in Venice, was purchased by George Spencer, the Marquess of Blandford, for £2,240.