February 18, 1564: Michelangelo Buonarroti, the Italian Renaissance artist whose works include the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, dies.

February 18, 1688: Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, issue America's first formal protest of slavery.

February 19, 843: Empress Theodora reinstates icons once and for all in the Eastern churches, effectively ending the medieval iconoclastic controversy. A council in 787 had allowed the veneration of icons, but opponents of images still controlled most of the government and much of the church leadership. The controversy continued, however, and was one of the reasons for the Great Schism between Catholics and the Orthodox in 1054.

February 19, 1401: William Sawtrey, an English priest who followed the teachings of John Wycliffe, is burned for heresy, becoming the first "Lollard" (critic of the church) martyr in England.

February 19, 1569: Miles Coverdale, translator and publisher of the first complete English Bible, dies. Parts of his Bible were revisions of Tyndale's, but unlike his predecessor (with whom he once worked), he included no contentious prefaces or notes; instead, he penned an obsequious dedication to the king.

February 20, 1469: Thomasso de Vio Cajetan, the most learned of the Roman Catholic dignitaries sent to silence Martin Luther in the early years of the Protestant Reformation, is born. He was also one of the cardinals who convinced Pope Clement VII to reject Henry VIII's request to divorce Catherine of Aragon

February 21, 1142: Medieval French philosopher, teacher, and theologian Peter Abelard dies. Perhaps best known for his (chaste) love affair with nun Heloise, Abelard made his most important contribution in establishing a critical methodology for theology. Irritated with some of the unreasoning pietism of other monks, he wrote Yes and No, compiling the (sometimes conflicting) sayings of the Bible and church fathers on various controversial subjects.

February 21, 1173: Pope Alexander III canonizes Thomas Becket three years after the Archbishop of Canterbury's martyrdom at the hands of King Henry II's knights.

February 21, 1431: Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais, begins his interrogation of young Joan of Arc. She was eventually condemned as a heretic and burned at the stake

February 21, 1801: John Henry Newman, Anglican leader of the Oxford Movement, is born in London. The movement sought to reform the Church of England in a "high church" direction, but Newman left the church in 1845 to become a Catholic-a choice he explained in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864).

February 22, 1906: Black itinerant evangelist William J. Seymour arrives in Los Angeles to lead a lead a Holiness mission. The group grew larger as word spread of its revival meetings and speaking in tongues, and it eventually moved to a rundown building on Azusa Street. The church's revival is often cited as one of the birthplaces of Pentecostalism.

February 24, 1582: Gregory XIII issues a bull requiring all Catholic countries to follow October 4 with October 15 and replace the Julian calendar with the Gregorian (which we still use today). By 1582, the Julian calendar had drifted from the equinoxes by a full ten days.