the 1999 polemic, the respective journalist had published what he called "curse words" (sudălmi) aimed at Sigma authors. Also in 2005, Pecican was among the group of intellectuals who reacted to the controversial views held by the exiled writer Paul Goma on issues involving Bessarabia and World War II Romanian history. Alongside Radu Ioanid, Michael Shafir, Laszlo Alexandru, Andrei Oişteanu and others, he accused Goma of Antisemitism and Holocaust denial, and concluded that his Săptămîna Roșie volume, reflecting Goma's theory on the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia, was spurious. His polemics include the one against the new treatise on Romanian history, published by the Romanian Academy beginning 2002. Coordinated by the historians Dan Berindei and Virgil Cândea, the large collective work was sharply criticized also by Şerban Papacostea, Leon Şimanschi, Ştefan Andreescu and some other historians for alleged ethical problems, but Pecican accused the synthesis for its perceived nationalist and statist views. Later, when one of the authors, Mihai Bărbulescu, reacted against Pecican's arguments, the latter answered and presented new arguments. Work Medieval studies and historiography 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. Troia, Veneția, Roma (1998) deals with the imagined homelands of the Vlachs as they result from old written fragments conserved in later contexts, laying out some of the main characteristics of Romanian identity at the time of its first making. The cultural origins of the Romanians' negative self-image, both inherited and developed, is the topic of Pecican's Lumea lui Simion Dascălul (1998), where he attempts to define the cultural elites of Early Modern Moldavia (17th century) and to determine the reasons why Simion Dascălul, one of the leading Romanian chroniclers of the time, is misunderstood. Pecican's Arpadieni, Angevini, români (2001) focuses on the Romanian-origin lesser nobility in the Kingdom of Hungary under the Árpáds and the Angevins until the end of the 14th century; the volume contradicts both Romanian and