These three works on Hildegard of Bingen and Heloise - as female self-representations - as well as on French and German Minnesang and Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival - from the perspective of male imaginations of the feminine - are connected, among other things, as exemplary, subjective expressions of a historical era in which a social change occurred with partly dramatic transformations. It becomes evident that these seemingly disparate texts by such different authors predominantly reflect narcissistic defense mechanisms. The studies delve into all signs of change in an era when the first written self-representations of women in the Franco-Germanic region emerged, and where women in the earliest poetry of this linguistic area, in troubadour poetry and Minnesang, experienced an initially incomprehensible glorification.