The Royal Society and the Prehistory of Peer Review, 1665-1965

Recorded although the essay does not cite it, because it contradicts something the essay asserts. From the abstract:

Despite being coined only in the early 1970s, "peer review" has become a powerful rhetorical concept in modern academic discourse... Its origins have commonly been dated to the foundation of the Philosophical Transactions in 1665, or to early learned societies more generally, with little consideration of the intervening historical development.

Their finding is that refereeing emerged from the social practices of gentlemanly learned societies in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with written referees' reports part of the Philosophical Transactions process only from 1832.

The essay dates the peer review template to 1665. See the essay record.