Christopher St. Germain

Christopher St. Germain (1460-1540) was an English lawyer, legal writer, and Protestant polemicist of the Tudor period. His best-known work, Doctor and Student, published in Latin in 1528 and in English around 1530 to 1531, cast the relationship between English common law and the law of conscience as a dialogue between a doctor of divinity and a student of the common law, and is credited as an early theoretical statement of equity within English jurisprudence. The book served as a standard student primer on English law until it was succeeded by William Blackstone Commentaries on the Laws of England in the late eighteenth century. In his later years St. Germain also wrote Salem and Bizance (1533) and a Treatise Concerning the Division between the Spiritualty and Temporality (1532), works that drew him into a printed dispute with Sir Thomas More over the proper bounds of ecclesiastical authority.