Ovidiu Pecican's main contribution to medieval studies addresses the first stages of Romanian culture. Trapped between Eastern Orthodox ethos and Slavonic language, on one hand, and the Western or Latin influences, on the other, the old Romanian culture of the 11th-17th centuries faced a large variety of challenges, and showed a remarkable diversity. Pecican uncovered the prehistory of various enigmatic texts, reconstituting both lost texts and contexts, as well as the image of a whole written culture expressing the choices made by medieval Romanians in the Balkans and the territory between Danube and the Carpathians.