The English Bible: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries
The English Bible tradition is one of the strengths of the Prothro Collection. The exhibited editions, as well as dozens of lesser-known versions, provide a comprehensive historical representation of English Bible translation from the Reformation to the rise of Methodism. Beginning in 1535 with Miles Coverdale’s first edition of the English Bible and William Tyndale’s New Testament of 1536, the collection traces the controversial religious and political history of the English Bible through the publication of the King James Version in 1611. The collection’s eighteenth-century English Bibles culminate with the unique hand-corrected proof copy of John Wesley’s Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament of 1755.