Mersenne and His Correspondents: An Essay on the Social Origins of Modern Scientific Method

A review of and commentary on the letters exchanged between Marin Mersenne and his large circle of scientific and philosophical correspondents in the early seventeenth century. The particular focus of the study is the process by which Mersenne and his contemporaries developed new approaches to establishing knowledge in the wake of the Copernican revolution and the failure of the Aristotelian systems of explanation of physical phenomena.