By Lady Isabella Mea Caterina D’Angelo 

My on-going project is looking at dyes in the 15^th and 16^th centuries throughout Europe. The dyes could be ones we 100% know were used, such as madder, or ones that are just theoretically possible based on items we know they had access to, such as purple cabbage. I’ve mostly been  using various undyed white wool and some linen to test what would have been possible to get in a kitchen versus a professional dyer. This is partly due to me not being a professional dyer in  any way, but also looking at what the average person in the Renaissance could have possibly  done with their own undyed cloth by pinching a few ducats.  

Materials 

In period, wool and linen are both well established as being used in Europe by all social classes.^{12 3}It is for this reason, I chose both undyed white wool and linen for my dye pots. For the linen, I sometimes used a natural, unbleached linen, and sometimes used a bleached linen. A  couple of the experiments will show both types. 

For mordants, I used both iron and alum.⁴ While both iron and alum were known, alum could  come from a couple of different sources. One is the natural forms of alunite and alum shale which are found in Egypt and Italy, among other places accessible to Europe.⁵⁶ The other is in  the form of clubmoss, which appears to be more commonly used in Northern Europe.⁷

For my purposes, the alum I used is from Anne George’s dye shop and the iron I used is what  was left of the SOS pad after doing dishes. I wasn’t always careful with the iron to fiber weight  which did cause a couple of issues in some experiments.  

Dyes

Madder 

Madder as a dyestuff and the extensive cultivation of it in the medieval period is well known.⁸ The madder roots can provide a variety of reddish shades making it a common textile dye in the  Medieval and Renaissance period.⁹ 

For my own dye pot, I used some 3 year old dye stuff I had found in my closet and just hadn’t  used yet. I brought the dye pot to 70° C and added white vinegar for the acidity.  

From left to right: madder on wool with alum, madder wool with alum, madder wool with iron,  linen madder with iron, and linen madder with alum. Each of these came out far more 

brilliantly than in the picture, with both the linens coming out in fabulous pinks! The linen with  alum in the madder pot is a strawberry milk pink.  

Onion 

Onion skins as a dye seems to be a bit murky as far as period writings go. One secondary source  mentions Latvia as using onion skins for dyes, but that appears to be it.¹⁰ However, it is well  known that onions were cultivated early on popular in the medieval period.¹¹ In fact, in Denmark,  a woman’s grave dated to 700 AD was found with a piece of onion still intact.¹²

With the abundance of onions, and therefore onion skins, it seems unlikely that they wouldn’t  have been used to make a dye at some point. For my experiment, I heated the water with 4  produce bags of yellow onion skins, leaving it on low for an hour. Once I had a dye in the pot, I  removed the onion skins and added the yarns.  

Again, my camera has washed out the real color. The two top yarns are wool and the two  bottom yarns are linen. All the yarns in this case were given an alum mordant. The bleached  linen came out a very bright goldenrod.  

Red Onion

In the same vein, I did attempt a dye of red onion skins. However, due to soap residue in the  dye pot and my forgetting about the skins on the stove, the dye pot ended up with a mix of  burnt dye and too basic of a solution. I tried to correct it with vinegar but still ended up with  nothing on the linen and brown on the wool.  

From left to right is the bleached linen, the wool with an alum mordant, the wool with an iron  mordant, and natural linen. I ended up washing and reusing the linens in a different dye  experiment.  

Purple Cabbage 

Cabbage as part of even the poorest persons diet in the medieval period is fairly well  established.¹³¹⁴ Purple or red cabbage is seen in cookbooks of the time, such as below: 

Lamb with red cabbage. Put the lamb on fire, cut it, boil it, then cook it, add some bacon,  but you can do it without. Boil it until tender, put it to the fire and let it cook, clean the red  cabbage, poach it, twist it then put it to the meat, then add some honey and spices.¹⁵

Saint Hildegard Von Bingen, an abbess in the 12^th century, also mentions red cabbage in her  book.¹⁶

For my experiment, I took a head of purple cabbage from the grocery store and just peeled the  leaves into a dye pot of water and baking soda. Although wood ash would have been more likely  to have been used in period, baking soda also works as a basic on the PH scale and is what I had  on hand.¹⁷

The blob above is the wool and linen I pulled out of the dye pot. I had heated the water for  about three hours and couldn’t take the smell of boiled cabbage anymore. Still, the wool came  out in a nice blue with the alum mordant. The bleached linen with the alum mordant also came  out but the iron mordant did not.  

Alkanet 

The last dye I’ve tried thus far is Alkanet. Alkanet is a plant that grows in the south of Europe  and its roots are used as a dye.¹⁸ However, in trying to find the dye recipes for it in period, I  instead came across a lot of cooking recipes with alkanet in it, such as below: 

And when your broth boils take a good and large, fair and very clean frying pan, and put  very good fair and clear oil in and heat it very well; and, it being well heated and boiling,  throw in good alkanet which should be well cleaned, and cook it and remove it well and  

properly, and then strain it well and cleanly through one side of a strainer into fair  dishes, and then put it into your broth to the point at which the color of the said broth is  closer to rosy than to red. (1420, France)¹⁹

Still, there are several secondary sources indicating that alkanet was likely used as a dye in the  medieval period.²⁰ 

For my first experiment with it, I put half a jar of powdered alkanet (about 4 oz) into a  tupperware container with some sake I did not like. I left it for two weeks and then took out the  sludge to make a dye pot.  

I added 75-80% vinegar to the normal water and got a pH of 2. To up the pH, I added baking  soda which brought it up to roughly a 5. Once the pot was hot but not boiling, I cleared out as 

much of the alkanet sludge as I could and added the fibers, leaving them in the lightly heated  water overnight. 

The linens did not take to the alkanet dye at all. Although I used alum on all the fibers, only one  of the wools came out as a lavender. The other is a strange rosy brownish color that looks  different in different lights. My guess is that it may be due to different sheep but I am not sure. 

The second time I did the experiment, I left the fibers for three days in a black tupperware  container in the summer out on my balcony, hoping that that would heat the water enough to  get a good dye. I also used vodka rather than sake for the sludge and left it for over a month.  Only the wool came out – the other fiber I tried was silk- and again I got the strange pinkish  color.  

Future Experiments I plan on using lichen purple in the near future to see what I can get from that, possibly reusing  the silk from the alkanet experiment.²¹ I will also redo the madder and yellow onion  experiments. I loved the pink linen I got from the madder experiment and the yellow onion is a  pleasantly bright yellow that I hope to get on a larger cloth.

1. Rorke, Martin. English and Scottish Overseas Trade, 1300-1600. Economic History Society. The Economic History  Review, New Series, Vol. 59, No. 2 (May, 2006), pp. 265-288 ↩︎
2.  Franceschi, Franco. Wool in 14th Century Florence: The Affirmation of an Important Luxury Production, in Textiles  and Wealth in 14th Century Florence. Wool, Silk, Painting, Exhibition Catalogue (Florence, 5 December 2017-18  March 2018), Ed. by C. Hollberg, Florence, Giunti, 2017, Pp. 42-51. ↩︎
3. Newman, Paul B. Daily Life in the Middle Ages. Jefferson, N.C. : McFarland & Co. 2001.  https://archive.org/details/dailylifeinmiddl0000newm/page/92/mode/2up?q=linen ↩︎
4.  Stasińska, Katarzyna. Before They Dyed. Mordants and Assists in the Textile Dyeing Process in Anglo-Saxon and  Anglo-Scandinavian Britain: An Experimental Approach. EXARC Journal Issue 2021/4. 2021-11-25. ↩︎
5.  The early history of alum. (n.d.). Retrieved August 01, 2025, from http://www.wovepaper.co.uk/alumessay1.html ↩︎
6. Leitzel, Stephanie. Monopoly Making at the end of the Middle Ages: Italian merchant-bankers and the Political  Economy of Alum. Harvard University. https://mvstconference.ace.fordham.edu/culturesofexchange/coordinating color-across-the-mediterranean-medici-merchants-mediterranean-dye-markets-and-the-exchange-of-colored cloth-in-the-late-middle-ages/ ↩︎
7.  Gundersen, Kristina. Viking Age Dyes- A Brief Overview . 
   https://www.academia.edu/4652690/Viking_Age_Dyes_A_Brief_Overview
   ↩︎
8. Cloisters Museum. Madder Red. Met Museum blog post. 8 March 2013.  
   https://blog.metmuseum.org/cloistersgardens/2013/03/08/madder-red/
   ↩︎
9. Cloisters Museum. Madder Red. Met Museum blog post. 8 March 2013.  
   https://blog.metmuseum.org/cloistersgardens/2013/03/08/madder-red/
   ↩︎
10.  Brunello, Franco. The Art of Dyeing in the History of Mankind. AATCC, 1973. ↩︎
11.  Jay, Martha. Onions and Garlic: A Global History. Reaktion Books, 2016. ↩︎
12. Medievalists. The oldest Onion in Denmark. December 2014. https://www.medievalists.net/2014/12/oldest onion-denmark/ ↩︎
13. Muckenhoupt, Meg. Cabbage: A Global History. Reaktion Books, 2018 ↩︎
14.  Zeven, A.C. The history of the medieval vegetable garden of the common man and 
    woman: the poorness of descriptions and pictures. Rudolf Mansfeld and Plant Genetic Resources Proceedings of a symposium dedicated to the 100th birthday of Rudolf Mansfeld, Gatersleben, Germany, 8-9  October 2001 ↩︎
15.  The Prince of Transylvania’s Court Cookbook. Medieval Cookery. 16^th century, translated in 21^st century.  https://medievalcookery.com/search/display.html?trans:83:KBJ 
    ↩︎
16. Hildegard. Hildegard Von Bingen’s Physica: The Complete English Translation of Her Classic Work on Health and  Healing. United States, Inner Traditions/Bear, 1998. ↩︎
17. Dean, Jenny. Anglo-Saxon mordants. 12 July 2011. https://www.jennydean.co.uk/anglo-saxon-mordants/  
    ↩︎
18. Ravindran, P. The Encyclopedia of Herbs and Spices. CABI. 2017.  https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Encyclopedia_of_Herbs_and_Spices/6pJNDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1 &dq=alkanet+root&pg=PA22&printsec=frontcover ↩︎
19.  Cook, Elizabeth. Du fait de cuisine. Medieval Cookery. 1420s written, 20^th Century translated.  https://medievalcookery.com/search/display.html?dufai:7:ALKNT ↩︎
20.  Dean, Jenny. Alkanet Root. 22 June 2016. https://www.jennydean.co.uk/alkanet-root/ ↩︎
21.  Dean, Jenny. Anglo-Saxon dyes – lichen purple. 9 August 2011. https://www.jennydean.co.uk/anglo-saxon-dyes lichen-purple/ ↩︎