Elizabeth Melvill was a staunch Scottish
Presbyterian whose surviving poems and letters almost all relate to the efforts of
James the Sixth and First to impose episcopacy and other changes on the Kirk. Their religious content is thus political as well. A number of unpublished poems have been very recently identified. Her best-known text is an allegorical dream-vision, a first-person narrative of the religious life as a quest and an arduous journey towards the celestial goal.
S. M. Dunnigan in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls her "one of the most important religious writers in Renaissance
Scotland."
Milestones
About 1575 Submissions to the
International Genealogical Index put EM's birth at this time, but probably they are highly speculative; recent scholarship suggests a few years later.
Probably after January 1604 A Godly Dreame, a translation into English of the Scots-language
Ane Godlie Dreame (issued by the same
Edinburgh publisher the year before) is probably the work of the original author, EM.
In or after 1640 EM's date of death seems to be unrecorded, but it must have been after 1639, and is assigned to this year by the
Dictionary of Literary Biography.
