Dear Anthony and All, Just to answer a few things from your message:
If the evidence from surviving lutes is anything to go by, a double first was common on 7 and 8c lutes. There is no reason to associate this practice with any specific number of courses.
I am in no doubt that the author of the Burwell lute tutor was referring to the upper octave of the 11th course when he said "small 11th" (because of the other remarks about how thick this string has to be, etc.).
The 10/11c conversion I was describing is nothing to do with the octave-only 11th. If you have a 10c lute with a single first and all the rest double, that means you have 19 pegs. You only need one more for the 11c conversion not because the 11th is single but because the second is single: the 11c lute is 2x1 + 9x2 = 20 strings. But of course if you had a single 11th as well you wouldn't even need an extra peg....
TO seems to have become common at about the same time as the increase in courses from 7 to 10, so I would tend to stick to TI for 6c and have experimented with TO for lutes with more courses. I'm still in the early stages of learning TO, but I'm convinced it's the right thing to do.
Gut basses (of whatever type) are less stretchy than wound ones and therefore involve much smaller movements of the peg for big changes in pitch. I have been pleasantly surprised that retuning them is less of a problem than I feared.
Talking about pitch standards is confusing unless you specify nominal pitch. I still think of the "Dowland lute" as being "in G" even though it might be at a'=392 or a'=330. Whatever kind of lute we're talking about, if it is around 67cm string length, the pitch of that top string should probably be no higher than f' at modern pitch, probably more like e'. A double first tends to push the pitch down because there's a limit to how thin a gut string can be made and there's another limit to how much tension you can stand to play on, especially if you play near the bridge.
Best wishes, Martin To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
