In 1749 George Whitefield complained that John Wesley was ‘monopolising the name of Methodist to himself only’. Wesley's success in seizing control of the Methodist narrative, bolstered by an army of denominational historians, has meant that in popular terminology Methodism equates to the Wesleyan movement and its Arminian theology. In fact, of course, as this volume points out, the Evangelical revival of the 1730s gave birth to ‘a plethora of competing Methodisms’ (p. 10) with rival agendas and a clash of personalities. Calvinistic Methodism has long been overlooked, hidden under Wesley's shadow, but this triumvirate of historians from Aberystwyth University seeks to redress the balance. There is perhaps some over-compensation and Wesley appears in a less than favourable light. We are told, for example, that he took advantage of Whitefield's long absences in North America ‘to grasp control of the English revival, using tactics that were unprincipled and possibly even dishonourable’ (p. 34), by purging the Bristol society of its Calvinistic elements. The volume provides a chronological survey from the revival to the formation in 1811 of the Calvinistic Methodist Church of Wales, soon the largest denomination in the principality, deeply embedded within Welsh political culture and national identity. In England, by contrast, Calvinistic Methodism failed to take root. Initially it was fostered amongst the Evangelical Anglicans and professed loyalty to the establishment, but the Countess of Huntingdon's chapel-building programme in the 1760s was ‘a kind of ecclesiastical subterfuge’ (p. 116). She saw persecution as a badge of honour and was forced to register her Connexion as Dissenting, but she failed to prise Evangelical rectors like Henry Venn and William Romaine away from the Church of England. The central motifs of the narrative are internal strife, personal animosities, recriminations, splintering and general disarray. It is far from a heroic tale. Harris was thrown out of the movement in 1750 for dalliance with his favourite prophetess, Mrs Sidney Griffiths. Amongst Lady Huntingdon's Evangelical ministers we encounter antinomianism, adultery and homosexuality. Wesley and the countess died within four months of each other in 1791 and, as these authors poetically exclaim, their deaths ‘placed punctuation marks against English Methodism: his a comma, hers for all intents a full stop’ (p. 233). While Wesleyan Methodism flourished and became a global phenomenon, Huntingdon Methodism atrophied and imploded. This engaging account is deep in both the original manuscripts and the latest literature, peppered with well-chosen quotations. It makes new connections by traversing across both Wales and England, from Llangeitho and Trefeca to Bath, Oxford and London, demonstrating the closely interwoven nature of the early Evangelical networks. New paths are sketched out for potentially fruitful future research. It is remarkable, for example, that there has never been a critical edition of George Whitefield's voluminous papers, including over 2,500 letters which would shed fresh light on transatlantic Evangelicalism in the mid-eighteenth century. This accessible but sure-footed volume is likely to become the standard introductory text for all students of early Methodism in its Calvinistic clothing.