Burnable Books: “Binders Full of Women” – Mitt Romney’s Theology of the Book

This. Is. Awesome.

By far the best analysis of “Binders Full of Women” we’ve seen.

Go read it.

“While Hildegard never tells us about the invention of the binder itself, one of her more obscure letters (yet to be edited from the autograph manuscript in Cologne) makes great theological hay out of the holy binder she claims to have seen in one of her many visions. Drawing on the venerable medieval tradition of interior writing, Hildegard rather gruesomely imagines the binder as a thousandfold stack of parchment folios, all rendered from the skins of women martyrs (the specific allusion is to the 11,000 virgin followers of St. Ursula beheaded by the Huns in the fourth century). Particularly intriguing are her glosses of the binders’ holes as the three persons of the Trinity and of the rings as the Three Marys.”