the svea court of appeal in the early modern period 400 are extremely extensive and well-kept and constitute an immense resource for legal historical research. While social historians have been eager to use these records for many years,1150 the Swedish and Finnish legal historians, however, have got to grips with them only with this volume. The records of the criminal cases of the Svea Court of Appeal, have been greatly reduced by culling in the nineteenth century. But, as Per Nilsén demonstrates in his article in this volume on “Slandering the King and His Councillors,” it is possible with help of the huge collections of criminal verdicts assembled by Magnus Becchius Palmcrantz (1653 – 1703) in the late seventeenth century (in the National Archive) to reconstruct the development of Court of Appeal practice in such cases.1151 In the Göta Court of Appeal (the appellate jurisdiction for southern part of Sweden) the records are complete, and have been kept since the court’s inauguration in 1635. The older parts of the records of the Court of Appeal in Turku (Finland), however, were totally destroyed by fire in 1827. The records of the Court of Appeal in Dorpat (Livonia) were closed to research during the Soviet period, which had consequences for Anna Christina Meurling, when she wrote her dissertation on the Court of Appeal administration in Dorpat during Swedish rule in the late 1960s.1152 Meurling could only use sources in Swedish archives, but since the collapse of the iron curtain about 1990 these former Soviet archives have been successively opened to research, and the court’s records (now in Riga) have also been used extensively by Heikki Pihlajamäki, including for his comparative article in this volume. Even if not represented in this volume, the records of the Tribunal in Wismar, theHigh court for the Swedish provinces within the German empire are also of great interest. After the reunification of Germany, the records of this court have been the subject of interest, and the keeper of the records in Wismar, Dr. Nils Jörn, has published extensively on them from its first period (after 1653).1153 1150 E.g., Winberg, Christer 1985; Sundin, Jan 1992; Thunander, Rudolf 1993. 1151 The Royal Svea Court of Appeal’s verdicts and explanations concerning capital offences with appurtenant royal ordinances and rescripts, see Per Nilsén’s article in this volume, p. 207. 1152 Meurling, Anna Christina 1967. 1153 Jörn, Nils – Diestelkamp, Bernhard – Modéer, Kjell Å. 2003; Inventar der Prozessakten des Wismarer Tribunals, vol. 1: Bestand des Archivs der Hansestadt Wismar (ed. Nils Jörn).
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