I think it is important to distinguish three things: the reader implied by the language, the instructions, and extant music with arpeggios. The extant music is the only thing that shows what people played, and this music does not, as a general rule, arpeggiate relentlessly from the bass up. The reader implied by the language is someone who doesn't know the style, and would therefore be totally confused by the music, maybe not buy the book (horrors). Therefore simple instructions are provided, which may or may not be a clue, but probably are not rigorously prescriptive to the point of creating a stylistic anomaly.
In this respect, the instructions are like every other set of instructions, a simple, get you started set. The instructions are not a grand overview of lute playing, a comprehensive tome like Morley's Music treatise, which contains highly technical information. It would be interesting to try to reconcile the instructions with extant music, but even if there were a set of variations written out in this style, one could, as in the case of the unmeasured preludes for keyboard, make the case that the notated pattern is merely a starting point. Extant arpeggios often start with the top note as a way to build layers of melodic interest, or vary the pattern at dissonant points, and so on. However, that's just my interpretation. The great thing about Early Music is that ppl can look at the sources and come to very different conclusions. That gives us a level of variety which approaches the variety and diversity of the past, which is distinctly non-uniform. I love the fact that we can have an infinite number of different performances from this one, important work. dt To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
