part i • supreme courts • bernhard diestelkamp deal of material was removed. The records of the Reichshofrat (Imperial Aulic Council) were in an almost unusable state, stored uncatalogued in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, the Austrian State Archives in Vienna. Things were not much better when it came to secondary publications. For the Hofgericht, the mediaeval royal court presided over by the Emperor, only Otto Franklin’s monumental publication from 1867–69 was much help, and then only ahandful of Hofgericht cases had been included, a situation not improved by Franklin’s sparse references to the primary sources. There was Rudolf Smend’s still unmatched monograph on the Imperial Chamber Court (1911). Smend’s careful examination of the records, however, had not changed the fundamentally negative view of this court. Otherwise the pre-1968 literature amounted to few titles, mostly theses. The most important procedural statutes (Ordnungen) for the Imperial Chamber Court had been published and were useful, even though they did not meet the standards of a critical edition. More miser-able still was the situation for the Aulic Council. Only a description by Otto von Gschliesser, published in 1942, was available; there were no theses or articles to be found. The statutes for the Aulic Council could only be found published piecemeal in theReichspublizistik, the constitutional literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Plainly, the considerable backlog in this area of legal history was too great for one person to cope with. My colleagues Ulrich Eisenhardt, Gunter Gudian, Adolf Laufs, Wolfgang Sellert and I decided to share the work between us in the hope of filling the gaps in the foreseeable future. I took on the job of identifying and collecting the Hofgericht material up to 1451. My research plan for the royal jurisdiction in the High and Late Middle Ages was to use the project’s sources to detail the transformation of the court over a couple of centuries. The project was initially financed by theGermanResearch Foundation, and from 1970 by theMainzer Akademie der Wissenschaften und Literatur (Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature). Together with my three collaborators, Friedrich Battenberg, Ute Rödel, and EkkehardRotter, we have published sixteen volumes, and with the seventeenth, edited by Ute Rödel and published in 2019, the time up toKing Ruprecht (1400–1410) has been covered. There is no pro58
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