In Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England, Assistant Professor Emily Thornbury (English) revises scholarly views of the literary culture of Anglo-Saxon England. Scholars have previously assumed that the status of Anglo-Saxon poets was self-evident: a poet, then as now, was someone with a vocation, and verse-making was a recognized career. Professor Thornbury's work shows, however, that Anglo-Saxon poets usually learned to compose verse to further some other social role—often as teacher, scribe, musician, or courtier. Her book project investigates the ways in which social relations affected Anglo-Saxon poets' experience, and argues that the work of those who learned their art as part of a community of other poets differs strikingly from that of autodidacts, who inferred the rules of verse from often faulty or damaged manuscripts. By examining specific instances of how the material culture and social order of early medieval England conditioned the work of poets in both Latin and Old English, Becoming a Poet illuminates the ways in which aesthetic standards were negotiated between individuals and their wider communities.