Struggling to Name It
Madeleine JacobThe Tudor ruff – a wide, detachable collar worn around the necks of male and female courtiers – was made of cotton or lace and had to be very stiff to maintain its shape. A white powder derived from wheat and, later, other plant matter, starch is a stiffening or gluing agent that can preserve minute pleats in the fabrics it is applied to. In its life as an adjective, ‘starch’ is a variant of the Old English word ‘stark’ – which ranges in meaning between the physically stiff, the brutally truthful and the stripped-bare. Starch writing has a stiffness too. It’s overly formal, even pompous.
While starch powder has conspired with the cotton picked by enslaved people in the Americas and worn by aristocratic men from Thomas Bodley to the Bullingdon Club, it is also the material known and used by the laundry-doers of history to press and stiffen the clothes of their masters and/or husbands.
According to sixteenth-century pamphleteer Philip Stubbes, starch was made by the devil to keep his aristocratic servants in ostentatious ruffs:
‘a certaine kinde of liquide matter which they call Starch, wherin the deuill hath willed them to wash and diue his ruffes wel, which when they be dry wil then stand stiffe and inflexible about their necks.’
Clearly, starch’s stiffening effect is erotic. Starch mediates between wetness and hardness. It slops between the human and plant worlds, and drips stickily like seminal fluid. Some chemical starches are modified and synthesised since root vegetables have a tendency to fall apart; a potato crisp disappears quickly into the mouth. Potatoes destined to be made into crisps are therefore often roasted with acids and esters for resilience – the agricultural market demands consistency and integrity, qualities which starch alone struggles to afford.
Starch is commonplace and, in William Tyndale’s 1536 Dialogue with Thomas More, it is thereby unsuited to transubstantiation – in which the bread and wine eaten by Catholic Christians at communion physically becomes Christ’s flesh and blood. Tyndale suggests winkingly that the pope, wanting to make communion bread appear otherworldly, invented the wafer: ‘little pretty thin manchets that shine through, and seem more like to be made out of paper, or fine parchment, than of wheat flour.’ A material’s materiality – as usual – influences its use and reception: it ‘was no small question in Oxford of late days, whether [the communion wafer] were bread or none; some affirming that the flour, with long lying in water, was turned to starch, and had lost its nature.’ Flour has lost out on its divine destiny, traded bread for measly starch. In the wake of a political and religious rupture (the Reformation), what we have been left with is a lowly and marginal material. Yet that material – like Bible paper – is translucent and potentially illuminating. The manchets ‘shine through’, says Tyndale, and beautifully represent – if not become – the body of Christ. So starch, while menial and imperfect, can operate as a makeshift lens through which to look for meaning.
Out of the court, the colony, hell, the laundry, the tilled field, the church-back-room, out of Oxford – and most importantly, out of error – ‘starch’, like most words, is a chain of shiny images glinting seductively for further inspection, as well as a gloopy, greyish mess of meaning.