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 Hungarian historiographic tradition, which have traditionally claimed that Romanians were only
serfs under Hungarian rule or that Romanians were brought from the Balkans and into Transylvania only to guard the Hungarian border. The volume raised debates between the author and historian
Ioan-Aurel Pop, who claimed that Pecican's views favored the Hungarians.
Realități imaginate și ficțiuni adevărate în evul mediu românesc (2002) and
Trecutul istoric si omul evului mediu (2002) center on newly discovered medieval historical writings from Transylvania,
Wallachia and Moldavia. They include annals from the times of
Wallachian Prince Vlad III the Impaler, as well as from previous and subsequent periods, which, Pecican indicates, show the vitality of a culture in its development and the dialog with the neighboring cultures. The debate on regionalism prompted Ovidiu Pecican to write a new book on the regional political forms before and after the founding of the
Danubian Principalities, under the title of
Originile istorice ale regionalismului românesc (2003). The historian argues against the
essentialist image of the
nation-state, and points to a rich originality of political forms, autonomy experiments on the lower Danube and in the Carpathians, foreign influences and original answers. Some of the other volumes written by Pecican also reflect his questioning of official versions provided for the past.
Sânge și trandafiri. Cultura ero(t)ică in Moldova lui Ștefan cel Mare (2005) attempts to provide the reader with a different image of the national hero
Stephen the Great,
Prince of Moldavia (1457–1504), who was sanctified by the
Romanian Orthodox Church. The volume focuses on
erotic and heroic mixture of instinct and behavior at Stephen's court, as it appears to have been reflected in literature and arts of his time. In
Între cruciați și tătari (2006), the attempt is to understand the challenges confronting
post-1989 Romania and its longing for integration into
NATO and the
European Union, by comparing them with the years between the
Fourth Crusade (1204) and the
Mongol Invasion (1241–1243), when the Western world extended itself down to the Carpathians. Pecican is also interested in how Eastern European culture developed in contact with the Western culture during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Hașdeenii. O odisee a receptării (2003) and
B. P. Hasdeu istoric (2004), books developed from his PhD thesis, attempt to explain how, through the efforts of several leading intellectuals during the second part of the 19th century, modern nationalism, together with
liberalism, formed a nationalist identity.
Poarta leilor. Istoriografia tânară din Transilvania (Vol.I: 2005; Vol.II: 2006) is a synthesis concerning the young historiography from Transylvania after the
Romanian Revolution of 1989, investigating its attraction to the Western model and its polemic with the nationalist-
communist autochthonous model as developed by the
Communist regime.
Novels Pecican's first novel,
Eu și maimuța mea, written in 1994, speaks about love in a psychiatric hospital in the times of
Nicolae Ceauşescu's dictatorship. The modular formula of the narrative contributes to creating a lyric atmosphere, underlying the contrast between the purity of the love story, on one hand, and the dark context, on the other. Later in the same year, Ovidiu Pecican and his cousin, Alexandru Pecican, completed work on a second novel,
Razzar, a mythical and
archetypal metaphor of the human destiny elaborated within the literary conventions of the science fiction genre.
Razzar received the
Nemira Publishing House Prize for novels in 1998. Nine years later, Pecican published a third novel,
Imberia, which depicts the daily dilemmas a young intellectual has to face in post-communist Romania during the transition period (including sexual alienation and the trauma of his father's death). ==Published volumes==