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Abstract
This introductory chapter explores opposing semiotic systems in conflict as Carolingian ecclesiastics attempted to neutralize the power of what were, to them, implausible, alien, or threatening rituals in which women acted autonomously in the realm of the sacred. The mindset that women were peripheral in ecclesiastical affairs paralleled views about women's inability to control the occult through magic. The Carolingian reformers created an idealized picture of women as largely passive and vulnerable, but particularly when it came to spiritual matters, and magic was a spiritual matter. Churchmen feared rites that could nurture a worldview in which women reassumed an “illegitimate” spiritual potency that Carolingian culture had systematically eroded. Religious and secular authorities were determined to neutralize myths of female power. The establishment sought to destroy a matrix of pagan symbols that had the potential to promote concepts of women's majesty outside the liminal space in which they were incubated.
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