In making sense of the enormous corpus of histories about John Wesley and about Wesleyanism and Methodism in their founding period, Ted Campbell proposes that we examine the composition of these histories as though we were looking at computer code. In his introduction, he identifies five “narrative modules” that have been used by denominational historians to describe the background of the Wesleyan movement and thirty-one additional modules that have been used to narrate the life and progress of John Wesley and of the early Wesleyan movement. The remainder of the book examines how these three dozen narrative modules are utilized, or passed over and ignored, in representative histories from five eras of denominational historiography: the lifetime of Wesley himself, the “age of the early Methodist churches” (roughly 1800–1850), the “age of Methodist ascendancy” (1850–1900), the “age of Methodist modernism” (1900–1975), and “Methodism beyond modernism” (1975–present). This is not simply an exercise in Methodist historiography as written exclusively by members of the United Methodist Church; some works by British Wesleyan, American Holiness Wesleyan, and African American Methodist authors are considered also. This is all accomplished with great care and punctiliousness, an admirable concern for both concision and accuracy.

The result is a work that provides an interesting entrée into more than two centuries of writing about Wesleyanism. Some of the results are what one might expect. During the heyday of Protestant missions in the late nineteenth century, for example, the writers tended to emphasize Wesley as an evangelist more than during other historiographical eras. During the modernist period, an ecumenical Wesley received considerable emphasis. In the most recent decades, historical writing about Wesley represents “a complex and less heroic past” (161). In general, Methodist historians have done well not to simply portray a Wesley that reflects themselves but to provide the reader with genuine “insights into what really happened in the past” (167). The author points out that not all of the iconic portraits of Wesley fit comfortably with each other; for example, the picture of Wesley as a social reformer does not necessarily fit neatly with Wesley as a conservative high churchman or as an evangelist. But the jostling of competing narratives, in the author's judgment, is essential for maintaining a “vibrancy” of scholarship that captures the evolution of a faith community while also identifying and nurturing a “persistent core of beliefs” (181).

How all of these histories might be able to assist a Methodism that is undergoing significant centrifugal stresses at the present time over social and theological issues is not entirely clear, but reading this volume tends to build one's confidence that resourceful historians of Wesleyanism will be able to fashion the necessary narratives to speak to their contemporary spiritual situations long into the future. In addition, historians of other denominations might want to analyze their own historiographies using Campbell's clear and penetrating coding method as a template.