In "Sefer Hasidim" and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe, Ivan G. Marcus proposes a new paradigm for understanding how Sefer Hasidim, or "Book of the Pietists," was composed and how it extended an earlier Byzantine rabbinic tradition of authorship into medieval European Jewish culture.

In Dominion Built of Praise, Jonathan Decter looks at the phenomenon of panegyric in Mediterranean Jewish culture from several overlapping perspectives-social, historical, ethical, poetic, political, and theological-and finds that they depict how representations of Jewish political leadership varied across space and evolved over time.