ABSTRACT
Alongside yet separate from the professional jurist was the pious Christian and, alongside yet separate from these, the gentleman. This is not at all how its author opens a recent intellectual biography of Sir Matthew Hale. On the contrary, Alan Cromartie (1995:7) asserts that among ‘Hale’s great virtues was ignorance of the boundaries segmenting our own, more timid, mental lives’. A division of life into separate spheres has become the symptom of a flawed cultural history. Perhaps this is a mere rhetorical flourish. Yet Cromartie (1995:232) concludes by observing that it is ‘hard to read Hale’s works without being struck by the seamlessness of his intellectual world’.
