Elizabeth Melville first published Ane Godlie Dreame in 1603 in Scottish. She translated it into English in an undated edition, probably the next year, and may have revised some of its seventeenth-century editions. Although written in the tradition of medieval dream visions, the poem describes the uniquely personal religious experience of a woman active in the Scottish Reformation. Defining the spiritual quest that governed her whole life, it reveals a Reformation woman's confidence in her theological understanding and manifests her belief (endorsed in her letters as well) that the purpose of poetry is to serve religion. Although no complete twentieth-century edition exists in English, this poem's importance to seventeenth-century Scottish Presbyterians is witnessed by its multiple seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English editions (1606, 1620, 1644, 1680, 1686, 1692, 1698, 1718, and 1737)--more than any other single volume by a British woman who lived before 1640. Letters written to Melville by the Reverend Samuel Rutherford and John Livingstone's references to...