In This Modern Age: Medieval Studies in Honor of Paul Edward Dutton, ed. Courtney M. Booker and Anne A. Latowsky. Budapest: Trivent Publishing, 2023, 532 pp.

I am reminded of Paul Dutton whenever I don my green raincoat. Reaching into the pocket, I rediscover the handful of dried fava beans that he distributed to the audience of a keynote lecture that he gave at a conference on the material world of the early Middle Ages hosted by Pacific University in October 2016. The beans illustrated a point that he was making about the so-called “Green Children of Woolpit,” a legend about the sudden appearance of two strange children, a sister and a brother, who caused a stir in a twelfth-century Suffolk village because their skin was green and they only ate fava beans. Their outward appearance, Dutton argued, may have been symptomatic of hemolytic anemia (favism), a reaction to eating fava beans that can cause skin discoloration of this kind. The beans served a higher purpose, however. Over the years, they have demonstrated to me how tactile encounters with material objects evoke powerful memories. Those who know Paul Dutton will recognize many aspects of his intellectual character in this anecdote, not least his penchant for drawing significance out of odd bits of medieval cultural history that other historians have dismissed as meaning-deficient.