This article focuses on the trajectory of Methodist historical studies since the middle of the twentieth century. Since the 1970s, the scholarship on the rise of Methodism in the British Isles and the United States has made considerable progress in viewing Methodism as an international movement – a movement with symbiotic connections to the Enlightenment and the rise of modernity, and one with a clear majority of women in its ranks. In taking these issues seriously, better answers have been supplied regarding the nature of the ‘lived religion’ of all kinds of Methodists, not just adult white male elites. But there is still much to be done. Not only does the social history of Methodism need to be treated as seriously as its historical theology, but new kinds of social and cultural history emphasizing the agency of children, women, and different ethnicities will need to be imagined.