ABSTRACT
Among the fantastical races and creatures depicted in Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift singles out for particular satire a class of citizen among the Laputans, a people who lived on a floating island city and rule those on the earth beneath them. Isaac Vossius was the seventh of nine children, born in 1618 to Gerhard Johann Vossius, a towering figure in theology, classical philology, and rhetoric during the first half of the seventeenth century. Raised in the Vossius home in Leiden – at that time a prosperous university and textile-producing Dutch city second in population only to Amsterdam – Isaac was immersed in a highly literary family culture steeped in the academic practices of historiography and exegesis. An ambitious attempt at reconciling eighteenth-century rhythmopoeia with contemporary musical practice appears in a 1911 work entitled The Aristoxenian Theory of Musical Rhythm.
