John Wallis's 1685 history of algebra used Mabillon-style documentary evidence to rule for Harriot over Descartes in a priority dispute

G.I. Sinkevich's 2017 historiography-of-mathematics preprint states that "Voss' and Mabillon's works influenced subsequent researchers and J. Wallis, in the first place" — naming Jean Mabillon's 1681 diplomatics as a direct influence on John Wallis's 1685 Treatise of Algebra both Historical and Practical, described as the first history of algebra to apply "the doctrine of historical sources, evidence of their authenticity" to a live scholarly dispute: whether Descartes derived his method from Thomas Harriot's posthumous 1631 Artis Analyticae Praxis. Wallis's text, reproduced in the source, marshals correspondence and an eyewitness account — Sir Charles Cavendish showing Harriot's book to Roberval in Paris, who exclaims "Il l'aveu! Il l'aveu!" ("He had seen it! He had seen it!") — as documentary proof against the received Cartesian attribution. The source's own narration concludes: "Wallis was right about the seniority of Herriot. Descartes had Herriot's treatise when he was writing his Geometry."

This is the same methodological act as documentary source criticism — authenticating an origin-claim against dated documents rather than the received account — applied by name-checked inheritance from Mabillon, decades before Ranke, and via a route the vault's open question about a Mabillon-to-priority-adjudication descent did not anticipate: straight into 17th-century historiography of mathematics, bypassing Quellenkritik entirely.