Chiastic studies, a step-child of literary analysis and cousin to several other critical methodologies, have become enormously popular since the publication of N.W. Lund's Chiasmus in the New Testament in 1942. However, modern studies of the figure of chiasm (a.k.a. chiasmus, concentric or inverted parallelism, ring composition rhetorical helix, et al) actually began in the I8th century. A survey of the history of chiastic studies from their beginning into the contemporary period indicates that chiastic analysis, while popular, rests precariously upon an insufficient theoretical foundation.