Ane Godlie Dreame



Mar 24, 2018 Ane godlie dreame, compylit in Scottish meter be M. Gentelvvoman in Culros, at the requeist of her freindes, by Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross. 'Samantha Banks! Get a hold of yourself, woman! I have a girlfriend!' It could have been just another school year for Samantha Banks. Her aim was simple: graduate top of her class, leave town, and move to a good college, but at the same time, stay hidden under the radar. Dec 12, 2014 Elizabeth Melville’s Ane Godlie Dreame is more than just reasonably good poetry. Like Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet, it is a Calvinist’s call to action, a work of political as well as religious significance that should not be trivialized.

From the seventeenth century they were some notable aristocratic female writers. The first book written by a woman and published in Scotland was Elizabeth Melville's Ane Godlie Dreame in 1603. Later major figures included Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw (1627–1727) and Lady Grizel Baillie (1645–1746). Melville’s Ane Godlie Dreame (1603) has been compared to the dream vision poems of Aemilia Lanyer and Rachel Speght; however, this chapter argues that Melville is best understood as writing in a pietist poetic context defined by her Scottish contemporaries Alexander Hume and James Melville.

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  1. The Poems of Alexander Hume, ed. by Alexander Lawson, STS (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1902), pp. 3–5.Google Scholar
  2. Her father had authored the Memoirs ofHis Own Life; cf. edition by Gordon Donaldson (London: Folio Society, 1969).Google Scholar
  3. 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.Google Scholar
  4. 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).Google Scholar
  5. 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.Google Scholar
  6. J. Stephen Russell, The English Dream Vision: Anatomy of a Form, (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1988), p. 116.Google Scholar
  7. 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.Google Scholar
  8. 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’.Google Scholar
  9. 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.Google Scholar
  10. 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. 63Google Scholar
  11. 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.Google Scholar
  12. The Works of John Knox, ed. by David Laing, 6 vols (Edinburgh: J. Thin, 1854; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1966), III, 15.Google Scholar
  13. Ian Donnachie and George Hewitt, A Companion to Scottish History: From the Reformation to the Present (New York: Facts on File, 1989), p. 24.Google Scholar