the wismar tribunal: a survey of the research 97 promiscuity in one’s fields of research. Imagine how happy I was to come across Kjell Åke’s superb book.1 I read it, and came away with a head full of ideas of what to research and why – redoubled when we met and struck up an acquaintance. Kjell Åke had brilliantly charted the Treaty of Osnabruck of 1648 and the foundation of the Wismar Tribunal in 1653, rediscovering not just a high court of justice, but paving the way for research on high justice across Europe, as noted only recently by Mia Korpiola and Alain Wijfels.2 From that contact and through our mutual friend Bernhard Diestelkamp, we developed the idea of finding out what records survived from the High Court of Wismar, because research as we understand it needs accessible archival sources, and the better they are catalogued the easier they are to use. It sounds obvious, but a survey of any primary sources poses constant questions about how deep one should go. Dive as deep as possible and you will never find the bottom; skim over the surface and there will not be enough information for the scholarly community. We mulled this over at a couple of conferences around the 350th anniversary of the foundation of the High Court of Wismar in 1648 with leading colleagues from law faculties and archivists around the Baltic, and in doing so secured essential information and put the Tribunal on scholars’ horizons.3 Quite abit has happened since. A great many books have been published, theses have been written we would not have dreamt possible in 1998, and archives have made a slew of sources accessible. I amvery happy that with substantial help from the German Research Foundation, Beate-Christine Fiedler, Hans-Konrad Stein, and I have been able to make most of the information available to the public, both 1 Kjell Å Modéer, Gerichtsbarkeiten der schwedischen Krone im deutschen Reichsterritorium, i: Voraussetzungen und Aufbau 1630–1657 (Rättshistoriskt bibliotek, 24; Stockholm: Nordiska Bokhandeln, 1975). 2 Mia Korpiola, The Svea Court of Appeal in the early modern period: Historical reinterpretations and new perspectives (Stockholm: Jure, 2014); Alain Wijffels, European Supreme Courts: A portrait through history (London: Third Millennium, 2013). 3 Nils Jörn, Bernhard Diestelkamp & Kjell Å Modéer (eds.), Integration durch Recht: DasWismarer Tribunal (1653–1806) (Quellen und Forschungen zur Höchsten Gerichtsbarkeit im Alten Reich, 47; Cologne: Böhlau, 2003); Dirk Alvermann & Jürgen Regge (eds.), Justitia in Pommern(Münster: LIT, 2004).
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