This chapter surveys the fields of musicology and dance studies, examining some of the most influential historically themed scholarship that has emerged within the two disciplines – and echoed across their own disciplinary histories – since the early twentieth century. Paying particular attention to the work of towering musicologist Richard Taruskin and dance expert Lynn Garafola, the chapter provides a useful account of the ballet’s scholarly legacy and the principal themes that have arisen across what has been a stupendous (and seemingly endless) volume of literature. Of these themes, race, gender and national identity prove particularly enduring, as generations of scholars seek to situate the ballet within coterminous histories of rupture and continuity.