The Twelfth Congress of South-Eastern European Studies, organized in 2019 at Bucharest by the Association Internationale d’Études du Sud-Est Européen (AIESEE) under the aegis of the Romanian Academy and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), has already produced several collected volumes. The one published by Brill in 2021 and edited by Ioana Feodorov, Bernard Heyberger, and Samuel Noble comprises an explanatory preface, twelve chapters, and an epilogue. The latter describes the history of a few exhibitions on Melkite art, which started in 1969 with an exhibition of art icons curated by Virgil Cândea at the Sursock Museum of Beirut. A separate chapter presenting the art historiography of Melkite art, with two marvelous icons included as illustration, is authored by Charbel Nassif. This final focus on art in the book feels like a tribute to the inspiring influence that the Romanian scholar Virgil Cândea, a reputed medievalist, had upon his daughter Ioana Feodorov (born Cândea), the first editor of the volume and a continuator of some of her father’s projects.The book contributors, mostly Arabists, are affiliated with institutes of higher education or research in Bucharest, Paris, Louvain, Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Beirut, Kyiv, and Leipzig. With this volume, several of them reiterate older collaborations on Arabic philology and codicology (Ioana Feodorov, Mihai Țipău, Yulia Petrova) or on Melkite art (Ioana Feodorov, Charbel Nassif).The book speaks of little-known Christian communities in the Levant, which, over the course of history, have passed through serious threats and even disintegration, as is the case with the Christians after the Ottoman conquest of Syria in the sixteenth century and with the current consequences of the war in Syria. These Eastern Christians, either Arabs or Arabophones, have come to be known in the literature as “Melkites” (also as “Chalcedonians”), and they developed a rich Christian culture in the Levant, with Christian books translated into Arabic as early as the ninth and tenth centuries. Until not long ago, the Western world had poor knowledge of them, and there is still much work to be conducted on their written culture and art, which are far from having been entirely revealed over the past decades.Bernard Heyberger proposes the image of a “broker” or a “go-between” actor as better to define such Middle Eastern Christians in times like the seventeenth century, an age that Heyberger regards as unreasonably—and too early—simplified into Orientalist views à la Edward Said. Arab or Arabic-speaking priests, professors, diplomats, physicians, and even patriarchs reacted moderately to the influence of a rising Western culture by that time, a fact that so far has been treated indistinctly in terms of Saidian Orientalism. Heyberger gives many examples of Arab clerics and early-modern scholars whose biographies in Western Europe and related works should be better “unearthed” and not left solely to the traditional lines of inquiry. His idea is that in the literature, the Eastern Christians have been antagonized, either by Islam or Catholicism (as a result of persistent attempts to obtain their union with Rome), but as regards the latter, we can see that “Westernization” also acted as a teacher of concepts for them and mirrored similar reactions that enriched Eastern thought and behavior and, in the end, facilitated communication. For instance, Meletios Karma, metropolitan of Aleppo from 1612, and then Euthymios II, patriarch of Aleppo from 1634, had a tolerant, even friendly outlook toward the Latin church in Syria and a personal ethos that Heyberger says resembles that of a post-Tridentine Catholic bishop (p. 22). He looks into Meletios’s role and that of the Propaganda Fide office, respectively, in the translation of the Bible into Arabic, with conflicting interests between having it translated from the Vulgate, as desired by the second, and Meletios’s concerns for authenticity, which made him wish to relate the translation to the Greek version.Constantin A. Panchenko writes about the changing destiny of the Sinai Monastery of Saint Catherine in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, a period marked by its progressive collapse against the background of the last days of the Mamluk sultanate. Another part in his chapter details the life and revival in the sixteenth century of the Sinai Monastery of Mār Sābā and the presence of the Wallachian abbot Joachim Vlachos, according to a discovery discussed in 2003 by Adrian Marinescu.Vera Tchentsova analyzes the travel of the patriarchs Paisios of Alexandria and Macarius III of Antioch to the Great Moskow Synod of 1666–1667, when the Russian patriarch Nikon was officially deposed, whereas his ecclesiastical reforms were maintained and even reinforced, with lasting consequences in all Russia. The presence of the two Levantine patriarchs, compared at the time with Saints Peter and Paul arriving in Rome, is vivified through details that also reflect the tense balance of powers between the tsar and the patriarch in seventeenth-century Russia prior to the age of Peter the Great.Visibly connected to this chapter is also the one authored by Carsten Walbiner, who refers to the travel of Makarios ibn al-Za֜īm, the patriarch of Antioch, to the synod in Moscow in 1666–1667. Nevertheless, Walbiner is more interested in how the patriarch saw Russia and Russians and gives a close analysis of a few manuscript pages of his thoughts in Arabic. These texts indicate how in that decade—at the very least—the Eastern patriarchates of Antioch or Alexandria (not to mention Constantinople) were patronizing the fifth (and self-proclaimed last) patriarchate of Russia in terms of ecclesiastic guidance and cultural superiority. On the other hand, during the same time, the Levantines already supported, for material interests, the newly risen theory of the tsar as an heir of the Byzantine emperors and defender of all the Orthodox Church.The aforementioned travel of patriarch Makarios III to Russia was actually his second. Mihai Țipău writes an intriguing chapter about the travelogue of Paul of Aleppo, son of Makarios, during their previous travel of 1652–1659; it was an itinerant one that found them in the old Constantinople in 1652–1653. The historical and cultural references that the archdeacon Paul gives about the former capital of Byzantium combine the bias he retained from former Greek readings with personal archaeological knowledge, fresh observations, reading of mural inscriptions, and testing of local legends, all of which make his fascinating search for Byzantine traces quite a delectable story.Patriarch Makarios ibn al-Za֜īm is also in the center of the chapter by Sofia Melikyan, who deciphers Makarios’s literary activity as a hagiographer in the context of the Melkite Renaissance started by Meletios Karma. The building of a tradition of local saints and martyrs in the Byzantine style seems to have been his very aim. Stefano Di Pietrantonio provides a very substantial chapter on the translation activities of patriarch Athanasios III Dabbās and his complex circle of possible collaborators; he focuses on the translation of a treatise on rhetoric from Greek into Arabic. It is interesting to see here cases of untranslatability or cultural confusions regarding the basics of Greek mythology that were not known to the Arabs. Ioana Feodorov explores the hypothesis that the Orthodox Confession written by Peter Movilă may have been the source of a 1752 psalter from Beirut via a Greek translation.Last but not least, three chapters signed by Yulia Petrova, Serge A. Frantsouzoff, and Elena A. Korovtchenko describe collections of Arabic manuscripts from Kyiv and Saint Petersburg, among others, paying tributes to significant scholars in the field and therefore signaling sources for future scholarship on Arabic Christianity. The entire volume contains philological transcriptions, along with a heavy bibliography; the text is abundant in detail and is sometimes autoreferential. Most likely, proficient scholars in the field will be best served by such dense literature.