Elizabeth Melville

Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross (c.1578–c.1640) was a Scottish poet.

In 1603 she became the earliest known Scottish woman writer to see her work in print, when the Edinburgh publisher Robert Charteris issued the first edition of Ane Godlie Dreame, a Calvinist dream-vision poem. A large body of manuscript verse was discovered in 2002, and her extant poetry runs to some 4,500 lines, written in many different verse-forms. There are also twelve letters, eleven of them holographs.[1] Melville was an active member of the presbyterian resistance to the ecclesiastical policies of both James VI and Charles I. She was a personal friend of leading figures in the presbyterian opposition, whose frustration eventually erupted in 1637 in the Edinburgh Prayerbook Riots, leading to the National Covenant of February 1638, the Glasgow General Assembly which abolished the episcopate, and the outbreak of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.[2]

An inscribed flagstone commemorating her as one of Scotland's great writers was unveiled by Germaine Greer on 21 June 2014 in Makars' Court, Edinburgh.[3] The inscription is a quotation from the Dreame – "Though tyrants threat, though Lyons rage and rore/ Defy them all, and feare not to win out" (edition of 1606).

Culross Abbey Kirk, where Elizabeth Melville worshipped.
  1. ^ All twelve are held by Edinburgh University Library, shelfmark Laing III.347. See J. Reid Baxter,‘Elizabeth Melville's Letters in Edinburgh University Library, Laing III.347’ in Notes and Queries, (Oxford University Press), December 2006, pp. 525–528; 'Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross: Two Letters to her Son James’, in E. Ewan and J. Nugent (eds.) Children and Youth in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland (Martlesham: Boydell and Brewer, 2015), pp. 205–219.
  2. ^ See, inter alia, Rev. James Anderson, Ladies of the Covenant (Glasgow, 1862), 31–38, and W.K. Tweedie, ed. Select Biographies, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Wodrow Society, 1845–47), I, pp. 300, 316, 339, 346–47. See also Alexander Whyte, Samuel Rutherford and some of his Correspondents (Edinburgh, 1894), pp. 43–49.
  3. ^ "Elizabeth Melville Day, 21 June 2014". Archived from the original on 12 May 2014. Retrieved 10 May 2014.