Elizabeth Melville

Who was Elizabeth Melville?

Elizabeth Melville or Melvill, Lady Culross, 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. 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 and the Glasgow General Assembly, leading to the National Covenant of 1638 and the outbreak of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

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. 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”.