Abstract
Alexander Hume, Scottish clergyman and poet, dedicated his 1599 volume of verse to the ‘faithfvll and vertvovs Ladie, Elizabeth Mal-vill, Ladie Cumrie’.1 This ‘Ladie’ almost certainly was Elizabeth Melville, daughter of Sir James Melville of Halhill,2 and wife to John Colville of Culross. Little is known about her life except that she wrote some poetry, was respected as a pious woman,3 and went out of her way to encourage ministers of her religious persuasion who suffered for their faith. She wrote a sonnet of encouragement for the imprisoned pastor John Welsh4 and several letters to the exiled pastor John Livingstone.5 But even with such a sincere desire to minister to others, Elizabeth Melville had no opportunity to provide religious comfort or exhortation from a Scottish pulpit. The ‘Scots Confession’ of 1560, an important document of the Scottish Reformation, expressly barred women from preaching or engaging in other pastoral roles.6 To circumvent such restrictions, Melville drew upon the well-established literary tradition of the dream vision to illustrate the Reformist doctrine of ‘justification’ while yet a woman writer and also implicitly to lay claim to her own justified state.
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Notes
The Poems of Alexander Hume, ed. by Alexander Lawson, STS (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1902), pp. 3–5.
Her father had authored the Memoirs ofHis Own Life; cf. edition by Gordon Donaldson (London: Folio Society, 1969).
For Melville’s sonnet (c.1605) written for Welsh, see Germaine Greer’s edition, Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse (London: Virago, 1988), pp. 33–4; An Anthology of Scottish Women Poets, ed. by Catherine Kerrigan (Edinburgh: EUP, 1991; rpt. 1993), p. 156.
Several letters from Melville to the exiled pastor John Livingstone were published as a supplement to Livingstone’s ‘Life’ in Select Biographies, ed. by W. K. Tweedie (Edinburgh: Wodrow, 1845–7), pp. 351–70. In A Brief Historical Relation of the life ofMr. John Livingstone, minister of the Gospel, containing several observations ofthe divine goodness manifested in Him, in the several occurrences thereof. Written by himselfduring his banishment in Holland […], ed. by Thomas Houston of Knockbracken (Edinburgh: John Johnstone, 1848), Livingstone indicates that Melville remained an‘icon’ of spirituality in her mature years: ‘Of all that ever I saw, she was most unwearied in religious exercises; and the more she attained in access to God therein, she hungered the more’ (p. 346).
The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Part I: Book of Confessions (Louisville, KY: Office of the General Assembly, 1966), contains the full text of the ‘Scots Confession’ of 1560, pp. 11–25; within the ‘Confession’ is an attack on the Roman Catholic hierarchy: ‘they even allow women, whom the Holy Ghost will not permit to preach in the congregation, to baptise’ (XXII, 3.22), p. 23.
J. Stephen Russell, The English Dream Vision: Anatomy of a Form, (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1988), p. 116.
Hume, Poems, ed. by Lawson; Appendix D, pp. 185–97, provides a complete text of Melville’s poem as it was printed by Robert Charteris in 1603; this and all subsequent citations of Ane Godlie Dreame are from Lawson’s edition and will be referred to by line number.
The earliest two prints of the poem are at the National Library of Scotland, but Elizabeth Melville is listed as author in only one. The cover page of the dated print bearing the Scots title, Ane Godlie Dreame, is said to be ‘Compylit in Scottish Meter be M. M. Gentelwoman in Culros, at the requiest of her freindes’ and was printed by Robert Charteris in 1603. The other, also printed by Charteris (c.1603), is a more ornate edition lacking a date; the print bears the anglicised title, A Godly Dreame, on its cover page and is said to be ‘Compyled by Eliz. Melvil, Lady Culros Yonger at the request of a friend’. I assume ‘Eliz. Melvil’ of the anglicised version to be the same as ‘M. M. Gentelwoman in Culros’.
Sarah M. Dunnigan, ‘Scottish Women Writers c.1560-c.1650’, in A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, ed. by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (Edinburgh: EUP, 1997), p. 33.
Within the Augsburg Confession, written by Philip Melanchthon in 1530 and approved by Martin Luther, is a detailed definition of Justification, beginning with a brief definition: ‘Men cannot be justified before God by their own powers, merits, or works, but are justified freely for Christ’s sake through faith […] who by His death hath satisfied for our sins […]’. Protestantism, ed. by J. Leslie Dunstan (New York: Washington Square Press, 1962), p. 63
Maurice Taylor, ‘The Conflicting Doctrines of the Scottish Reformation’, in Essays on the Scottish Reformation 15–14–1625, ed. by David McRoberts (Glasgow: Bums, 1962), p. 45.
The Works of John Knox, ed. by David Laing, 6 vols (Edinburgh: J. Thin, 1854; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1966), III, 15.
Ian Donnachie and George Hewitt, A Companion to Scottish History: From the Reformation to the Present (New York: Facts on File, 1989), p. 24.
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Evans, D.D. (2004). Holy Terror and Love Divine: The Passionate Voice in Elizabeth Melville’s Ane Godlie Dreame . In: Dunnigan, S.M., Harker, C.M., Newlyn, E.S. (eds) Woman and the Feminine in Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230502208_11
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