Prior to the appearance of scientific journals in Europe, Marin Mersenne played a central role in the dissemination of the works of many of the key intellectuals active in the first half of the seventeenth century.
Wikipedia describes Mersenne as :
[...] the center of the world of science and mathematics during the first half of the 1600s. [...] and, because of his ability to make connections between people and ideas, "the post-box of Europe”.
Similarly, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says of him:
[...] he was rightly referred to as “The Secretary of Learned Europe” (“le secrétaire de l’Europe savante”, Hauréau 1877, p. 177) thanks to his sprawling correspondence, which extended his network across the whole of learned Europe, to his role as translator, editor, disseminator of scientific information, and to his ability to generate research and discoveries by creating “fine questions” (de belles questions, Pascal 1658, p. 1) addressed to the foremost scholars of the time.
MacTutor writes:
It was around this time that Mersenne started to become a coordinator for all European scholars. From 1623 he began to make a careful selection of savants who met at his convent in Paris or corresponded with him from all across Europe and even from as far afield as Constantinople and Transylvania (present-day Romania). His regular visitors, or correspondents, included Peiresc, Gassendi, Descartes, Roberval, Beeckman, J B van Helmont, Fermat, Hobbes, Étienne Pascal, and his son Blaise Pascal. He set up meetings of scholars from around Europe during which they would read and review scientific papers, both national and international, exchange contacts with other scholars and plan and discuss experiments and other work. This came to be known as the Académie Parisiensis and sometimes among friends as the Académie Mersenne. It was notably one of most resourceful centres of research at that time, meeting weekly at members' houses and later in Mersenne's cell due to his weakened health. The list of Mersenne's correspondents kept increasing and Mersenne himself did not hesitate to travel to meetings with scholars all around Europe.
But surely Mersenne's role was not unique in this regard. Other people must have performed similar functions elsewhere, even if not as notably as Mersenne.
Who were Mersenne’s counterparts in this regard? Was such a role essentially a late-sixteenth/early-seventeenth century phenomenon, depending as it did on a functioning postal system or are the other historical examples.
