Ellen or Elen More (fl. c. 1500–1535) was an African servant at the Scottish royal court. She probably arrived in Scotland in the company of a Portuguese man with imported animals.[1] There are records of clothing and gifts given to her, although her roles and status are unclear. Some recent scholarship suggests she was enslaved, and her arrival in Scotland can be linked indirectly with the slave trade.[2] She is associated with a racist poem by William Dunbar, and may have performed in Edinburgh as the "Black Lady" at royal tournaments in 1507 and 1508.[3]
- ^ Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Routledge, 2008), pp. 30-34, 291-4.
- ^ Louise Olga Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 250.
- ^ Bernadette Andrea, 'The Presences of Women from the Islamic World', Merry Wiesner-Hanks (ed), Mapping Gendered Routes and Spaces in the Early Modern World (Routledge, 2016), p. 295: Carole Levin, 'Women in the Renaissance', Renate Bridenthal, Susan Stuard, Merry Wiesner (eds), Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1998), pp. 152-173 at 161-4.