Elizabeth Melville

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.

James, who inherited Halhill, shared a father-in-law with Elizabeth, namely Alexander Colville (d.1597), Commendator of the Abbey at Culross, judge and privy councillor.

After studying at Edinburgh, in 1619 Alexander had moved to teach at the Protestant academy in Sedan in France, the home (since 1611) of the banished Scottish presbyterian spokesman Andrew Melville.

[28] In a letter of 1631 to John Livingstone, Elizabeth had commented that ‘Samuell is going to the colledge in Sant Andrews, to a worthy maister thair, bot I feare him deadly’, which indicates that her youngest child's behaviour had long been unpredictable.

Three of Samuel's doggerel pasquils (from 1643, 1669 and 1673) survive in manuscript, attacking Clerk Register Sir Alexander Gibson, Bishop Gilbert Burnet and the Earl of Dundonald respectively.

Mr. Robert had been suspended for nonconformity by Bishop Thomas Sydserf of Galloway, who subsequently ordered that Provost Glendinning and other local officials be imprisoned in Wigtown.

[33] The couple seem to have only one child, Elizabeth, presumably named for her maternal grandmother; her first husband was one George Glendinning, her second was John Maxwell, brother of the third Earl of Nithsdale, who died in the first half of 1658.

[35] At present, nothing further is known about Christian Colville, but Glendinning enjoyed some prominence in Covenanting Scotland, attending the Glasgow General Assembly that abolished the episcopate, and being one of the four Scottish commissioners sent to London to try to prevent the execution of Charles I.

In his essay ‘To the Scottish Youthe’ in the same volume, Hume set out his austere view that religious verse was the only poetry that Christians should read or write.

In Raban's 1644 Aberdeen print of the Dreame, ‘Away vaine world’ was joined by ‘Come sweet Lord, my sorrow ceas’, a Scots-language sacred parody of another English love-song.

The two comminatory ‘rhyme royal’ stanzas inscribed on the outer wall of the Melville mausoleum in Collessie kirkyard, built by Sir James of Halhill for his wife in 1609, are presumably the work of his poet daughter.

Manuscript survivals of individual poems (three sonnets, a sacred parody of Marlowe's ‘Come live with me’ and the large-scale ‘Loves Lament for Christ's Absence’) indicate that handwritten copies of some of her works were in circulation.

Totalling c.3,000 lines, these are found at the end of a beautifully copied manuscript volume of twenty-nine sermons on Hebrews 11, preached in 1590–91 by Robert Bruce, minister of Edinburgh.

[40] The last line of ‘A Sonnet sent to Blackness to Mr John Welsh, by the Lady Culross’, recorded in the idiosyncratic cursive hand of the presbyterian historian Rev.

[41] Edinburgh University Library’s Laing Collection holds a bound volume of eleven holograph letters by Elizabeth Melville, and a transcript of a twelfth.

Tweedie also included the texts of the eight holograph letters addressed to Livingstone by Elizabeth Melville, explaining that these had been transcribed by their original collector, the antiquary Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe.

[47] Having trained for the ministry in order to follow in his father’s footsteps, Livingstone found his path to a Scottish parish blocked by the episcopal hierarchy on account of his adherence to presbyterianism, and for several years he preached wherever he was welcome as a guest, including in Fife.

In his writings, Livingstone speaks with gratitude of the protection and support he was afforded by a number of ladies of the landowning classes, but he ‘has more to say of Elizabeth Melville than of any of the much grander grandes dames to whom he was beholden’.

[48] Melville’s letters to him make references to persons and places that demonstrate the extent to which she was part of the nationwide Scottish network of presbyterians practising passive resistance to Crown policy with regard to worship and Kirk governance.

[50] Modern scholarship on Melville dates back to David Laing's 1826 reprint of the 1603 text of Ane Godlie Dreame in Scottish Metrical Tales, reissued by Carew Hazlitt in 1895 as Early Popular Poetry of Scotland.

Laing omitted ‘Away vaine warld’, however, since he discovered a version of the text in the Margaret Kerr Manuscript of the poems of Alexander Montgomerie, whose date of death was completely unknown until the 1970s.

It is nonetheless curious that Laing failed to notice how closely this short lyric relates to the major theme of the Dreame, namely the spiritual bliss afforded in this earthly life by a truly unconditional love for Christ and complete trust in Him as guide and in the strength of His hand to protect and save.

However, Melville really began to register with contemporary scholarship only with Germaine Greer's inclusion and discussion of her work in the epoch-making Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of 17th-Century Women's Verse (1988).

In 1991, An Anthology of Scottish Women's Verse, edited by the Scottish-Canadian Catherine Kerrigan, likewise reproduced some stanzas from Ane Godlie Dreame and Melville's sonnet to John Welsh.

But Scotland's intimate links with France, by virtue of the 'Auld Alliance', meant that after the Reformation, great numbers of Scots continued to study and teach there, not least in the various French Protestant academies.

That Melville was aware of English literary developments, read the publications of Tudor puritan divines, and had an encyclopaedic familiarity with the Geneva Bible and its marginalia is not in dispute, but in literary terms, her work relates most immediately to the productions of her Scottish contemporaries Alexander Hume, James Melville and Alexander Montgomerie, and behind them, the presence of Sir David Lindsay's Dreme (c.1526; published 1574) and his huge Dialogue betuix Experience and ane Courteour, Off the miserabill estait of the world (Paris, 1558, Scottish reissue 1574), as well as the anonymous Gude and Godlie Ballatis (1565 and several later editions).

Elizabeth Melville's language, her use of complex rhyme-schemes and alliteration, and of the Scottish interlacing sonnet form (ababbcbccdcdee) all belong to her native poetic tradition.

However, following Jamie Reid-Baxter's recovery of the manuscript poetry, there were two public concert presentations of Melville's life and work: 3 April 2004 in Culross Abbey, and 26 June 2005 in Innerpeffray Collegiate Kirk.

)[61] As her rhyme-schemes show, in Melville's Fife-Angus dialect, words like "peace", "cease", or "heid" and "deid" were pronounced as "pace, sayss, hayd, dayd" (cf.

[67] Dickson’s much-reprinted long poem, True Christian Love, to be sung with the common tunes of the psalms, first published in 1634, is reminiscent of Melville’s work.