English Research Seminar --- Professor Jeremy Smith (University of Glasgow) 'Mapping the religious lexicon of Elizabeth Melville of Culross (fl 1599-1631)'

Melville has been widely celebrated in recent scholarship as a major female voice in early modern Scottish society. A Fife magnate's daughter who was married to a Church of Scotland minister at Culross, she is now best known as the author of Ane godlie Dreame compylit in Scottish Meter (Edinburgh, 1603). This poem transmutes the dream-vision genre inherited from antiquity and the Middle Ages into a spiritual autobiography appropriate for reformed religion. In addition, a small corpus of her letters from the 1620s and early 1630s survives in manuscript, as do some other shorter poems. Today's paper offers a cultural map of Melville's lexicon and addresses the issue of ‘encoding' in relation to religious identities from a diachronic perspective, focused on the lexicon. It deploys corpus-based methodologies that have emerged in historical linguistics over the last two or three decades, combined with insights from historical pragmatics, the sub-discipline that engages with the socio-cultural contexts of linguistic behaviour.