This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Roger North is known today as a biographer and writer on music, architecture and estate management. Yet his writings, including thousands of pages still in manuscript, also contain critical reflections about intellectual and social changes taking place in England. This feature is little recognised, because North's reputation as an author was formed between 1740 and 1890, when seven of his manuscripts were published in editions that drastically altered his original texts, and when the reception of these works was influenced by 'Whig' criticism. Although some of North's writings were later edited according to more rigorous standards, many critics still utilise the discredited editions and continue to repeat 'Whig' stereotypes of North. Eschewing such stereotypes, Jamie C. Kassler provides the first interpretation of North's philosophy by retrieving what is consistent in his pattern of thought and by analysing some of his practices and purposes as a writer. By these methods, she shows that North, a common lawyer by profession, combined the moral scepticism of Montaigne with the legal philosophy of Coke, Selden and Hale. The result was a sceptical philosophy that accounts for North's critical reflections on the dogmatism of natural-law doctrine, both in its medieval intellectualist version and in its voluntarist reformulation that began with Grotius and was developed by Hobbes, Pufendorf and Locke. Kassler bases her interpretation on a wide range of North's writings, even those in which one might least expect to find a philosophy. In addition, one of his manuscripts, which is edited here for the first time, includes an exposition of his jurisprudence, as well as his attempt to bring England's past into the legal tradition. These features form part of North's broader argument that language, including the language of law, is the invention of humans and a representation of their changing history and habits, an argument that he later extended to musical 'language' in his more finished essay, 'The Musicall Grammarian' (1728).

A treatise on musical eloquence in all its branches, first published in 1990.

In the early 1690s Roger North was preparing to remove from London to Rougham, Norfolk, where he planned to continue his search for truth, which for him meant knowledge of nature, including human nature. But this search was interrupted by three events. First, between c.1704 and the early part of 1706, he read Newton’s book on rational (quantitative) mechanics and, afterwards, his book on optics in Clarke’s Latin translation. Second, towards the latter part of 1706, he and Clarke, a Norfolk clergyman, corresponded about matters relating to Newton’s two books, after which Clarke removed to London and the correspondence ceased. Third, in 1712 North received a letter from Clarke, requesting him to read and respond to his new publication on the philosophy of the Godhead. As Kassler details, each of these events presented a number of challenges to North’s values, as well as the way of philosophising he had learned as a student and practitioner of the common law. Because he never made public his responses to the challenges, her book also includes editions of North's notes on reading Newton’s books, as well as what now remains of the 1706 and later correspondence with Clarke. In addition, she presents analyses of some of North’s ’second thoughts’ about the issues raised in the notes and 1706 correspondence and, from an examination of Clarke’s main writings, provides a context for understanding the correspondence relating to the 1712 book.

North (1651-1734) makes lively forays into the worlds of natural philosophy, Christian stoicism, Cartesian science, architecture, music, education, and James II's treatment of the Protestant courtiers.

The period 1660–1720 saw the foundation of modern London. The city was transformed post-Fire from a tight warren of medieval timber-framed buildings into a vastly expanded, regularised landscape of brick houses laid out in squares and spacious streets. This work for the first time examines in detail the building boom and the speculative developers who created that landscape. It offers a wealth of new information on their working practices, the role of craftsmen and the design thinking which led to the creation of a new prototype for English housing. The book concentrates on the mass-produced houses of 'the middling sort' which saw the adoption of classicism on a large scale in this country for the first time. McKellar shows, however, that the 'new city' maintained a surprising degree of continuity with existing patterns of urban used and traditional architecture. The book presents the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century as a distinct phase in London's architectural development and offers a radical reinterpretations of the adoption of Renaissance styles and ideas at the level of the everyday, challenging conventional interpretations of their use and reception in this country.

Originally published in 1966, the Reeseschrift remains one of the most significant collections of musicological writings ever assembled. Its fifty-six essays, written by some of the greatest scholars of our time, range chronologically from antiquity to the 17thcentury and geographically from Byzantium to the British Isles. They deal with questions of history, style, form, texture, notation, and performance practice.