The Dyer's Vat

In the wool-dyeing trade of John Calvin's Geneva, cloth did not simply become colored — it was transformed. Artisans would submerge raw wool into boiling vats of indigo or madder root for hours, until the pigment bonded not merely to the surface but to the very fiber of each strand. Wash it a hundred times; the color remained. The wool had become what it was dyed to be.…