History of Protestantism

The Protestant Reformation began an attempt to reform the Roman Catholic Church. Protestantism originated from the ideas of several theologians starting in the 12th century, although there could have been earlier cases there is no surviving evidence of. However, these ideas were a subject to persecution by the Roman Catholic Church, and thus were kept isolated or effectively eradicated up to the 16th century. One of the early Protestant reformers was John Wycliffe, a theologian and an early proponent of reform in the 14th century. He influenced Jan Hus, a Czech priest from Prague, who in turn influenced German Martin Luther, who sparked the Protestant Reformation.