COVERDALE, MILES. - English religious writer, b. at Coverdale (Yorkshire) in 1488, d. in Feb. 1568. He was an Augustinian friar at Cambridge, where he came into contact with R. Barnes and T. Cromwell. He separated from Catholicism, traveled extensively abroad, and published in Zurich (1535) the first complete English Bible, whose second edition (1537) was the first published in England. He was bishop of Exeter from 1551 until 1553, when Queen Mary ascended the throne. The following year he obtained permission to leave England. In 1558 he was in Geneva, from where he returned to England and died there.
Coverdale was not a man of profound humanistic culture; for his translations he used Latin and German texts and showed, especially in the Book of Psalms, uncommon literary gifts. In 1539 he prepared a new edition known as The Great Bible, which became customary in English churches. The 1540 edition, preceded by a preface by Thomas Cranmer, is commonly called the Cranmer Bible.