History of Protestantism History of Protestantism Protestantism originated from work of several theologians starting in the 12th century, although there could have been earlier cases of which there is no surviving evidence. Any prominent dissent was subject to persecution by the Roman Catholic Church, and thus attempts to change anything in the Catholic Church were kept isolated or effectively eradicated up to the 16th century. One of the early Protestant Reformers was John Wycliffe, an English theologian and early proponent of reform in the 14th century. His followers, known as Lollards, spread throughout England but soon were persecuted by both the Catholic Church
Bible translations in the Middle Ages Psalms into a Northern English dialect, but later copies were written in Southern English dialects. Around the same time, an anonymous author in the West Midlands region produced another gloss of the Psalms — the West Midland Psalms. In the early years of the 14th century, a French copy of the Book of Revelation was anonymously translated into English, and there were English versions of various French paraphrases and moralized versions. In the late 14th century, John Wycliffe and perhaps Nicholas Hereford produced the first complete English language Bible. Wycliffe's Bible was revised in the last years of the 14th