Although the title may sound obscure and therefore uninteresting, Professor Alice Isabella Sullivan’s book exposes the reader to striking visual treasures and is a model for art historical scholarship. The book contains some 165 figures representing many different types of visual culture, including buildings (churches, monasteries, palaces, fortifications, and combinations of those types), plus many varieties of liturgical objects, votive textiles, and other types—a rich treasury indeed of little-known gems from a part of the world that has received too little mainstream scholarly attention.

Like neighboring Ukraine, medieval Moldavia did not form the basis of any major national/imperial culture, but instead stood fruitfully at the intersection of several of these cultures, with important influences both from the Gothic West and the Eastern Orthodox East. Both in title and in content, this book is a model of a rigorous and multi-dimensional analysis of a fascinatingly diverse culture that borrowed freely, even joyfully, from traditions that have too often been imagined as mutually hostile, all in a territory that falls mostly in present-day Romania but does not precisely coincide with any current modern state or culture. The liturgical and formal language was Church Slavonic, gradually changing over into Romanian over the period covered, roughly two centuries after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Thus, Sullivan takes part in a major reorientation now influencing my own field of Russian history, the questioning of nationalist/imperial narratives and a renewed attention to the edge spaces of the imperial culture-systems that have dominated discussions for generations.

The 55-page bibliography amply illustrates the labors of earlier scholars, chiefly Romanian, who had already documented the various facets of this rich visual culture. The extensive photos taken by the author and her family over several years significantly add to our knowledge and pleasure. But it is the analytical tools she brings to bear that distinguish her work. Organized by theme, Sullivan’s successive chapters discuss the landscape, ideologies of rulership, patterns of princely patronage, eclectic mixture of styles, interaction among rituals, spaces, and objects, and burial sites and memory. The chapter on ideologies is closest to my own work in early modern Muscovite history and reveals striking parallels between these two post-Byzantine cultures, each using a similar tool-box of Byzantine-inspired themes. These include the elevation of the local ruler to the status of Tsar/Emperor/Basileos, the recreation of sacred landscapes (of Jerusalem in Muscovy, of Mount Athos in Moldavia), the reverence for the Emperor Constantine as a model of Christian rulership and patron of sacred buildings, and, most surprisingly, the cult of a heavenly army of martyr saints led by the Archangel Michael, called by Sullivan the “Procession of Soldier Saints” (100–108), the last a striking parallel to the outsized sixteenth-century icon “Blessed is the Host of the Heavenly Tsar” placed near Ivan the Terrible’s royal seat in the Kremlin’s Dormition Cathedral. In both Moldavia and Muscovy, the strong apocalyptic implications of this latter subject were connected to expectations of End Times in 1492 (the year 7000 in the Byzantine calendar) and the fall of Constantinople in 1453, plus more hopeful local Christian victories, the failure of the Turks to take Vienna (1529), and Ivan’s Conquest of the Khanate of Kazan (1547). A 2024 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York explores African variations on these Byzantine themes: eighth-century Nubians, as well as Moldavians and Muscovites, saw their rulers as second Constantines.

Summing up the masterful exposition of these political themes in an early church, Sullivan concludes “[a]s such, space, image, and light are coordinated … to enhance the theological, political, and ideological messages of the site” (100). What I liked most about this book is its attention to all of these coordinated elements. Echoing the concept of Hierotopia in the work of the Russian Byzantinist Aleksei Lidov, Sullivan reveals for us the ways in which all the senses of the worshipers were engaged to create a total effect: extensive mural cycles both internal and external, the carefully calibrated sequence of architectural spaces activated in particular liturgical ceremonies, the effect of many types of ecclesiastical furnishings, acoustics and music, even the way that beams of sunlight traversed a space during the feast of St. John the Baptist.

Although Sullivan devotes an entire chapter (236–308) to analyzing the Moldavians’ careful integration image, architecture, and rituals of the Church, particularly the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, she uses the same approach for pretty much every structure subject to her careful analysis. The result is a feast for the eyes, and an often dazzling glimpse into a visual culture too often ignored in mainstream scholarship.