>Having the 4' on a separate manual 
doesn't bode well for dialoguing unless the music calls for the octave 
shift.<

Unless the intention is to combine two separate instruments in one box.  Like the French idea of having a solo 4' on the upper manual with nothing else.  The 1680s date of this spinet is not far removed from the date of such French instruments, IIRC.

I think we must take seriously the idea of having 4' standalone pitch in the 17th century.  There are plenty of ottavini and such-like instruments that attest to the idea of solo 4 (as opposed to its later use as a kind of mixture), no matter how oddball we moderns seem to find it.  In private communication with a certain harpsichord maker, he suggested to me that the native repertoire for such instruments may have been popular tunes.  These, not needing to be written down, have not survived for posterity, leading us to believe that ottavini had little or no repertoire and were constructed solely to use up odd scraps of wood, when in fact the rep was all oral/aural and didn't require notation.

BM

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