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. Some unpublished poems have been very recently identified.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."