Alisoun of Bath's delight in having had agency over her ‘world’ and her ‘tyme’, her willingness to bid farewell to the refined and desirable ‘flour’ of youth in favour of the more essential, coarse, but enriched ‘bren’ of age, is a cogent metaphor. Unlike Margery Kempe's maturing, divine wisdom, Alisoun's specialism is marriage, about which she claims to be ‘an expert in al myn age’ (l. 174). While many medieval literary representations of ageing women are pejorative portraits of malicious crones or ‘spent’ figures whose social efficacy terminates with their reproductivity, Alisoun's apparent ascent to the role of teacher and sage is not only an affront to St Paul's infamous ruling, but also an acknowledgement that, in her own words, ‘Experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world, is right ynough for me’ (ll. 1–2). The metaphor of grains as fecund is found in Paul's letters to the apostles, where the convergence of wheat and human generation is made explicit: ‘And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not the body that shall be; but bare grain, as of wheat, or of some of the rest. But God giveth it a body as he will: and to every seed its proper body.’ This connection is medicalised in Hildegard of Bingen's Causae et curae, where maternal milk is understood to be processed by the digestion of grain: ‘Milk also receives its whiteness from grain and other cooked foods. Grain has white flour, and food, in cooking, emits a white foam’ (Nam et de cibo frumenti et de aliis coctis cibis lac albedinum capit, quia frumentum albam farinam habet et cibus, dum coquitur, albam spumam eicit). Such ideas then become literalised into medical treatments for infertility.