 An interesting early thirteenth-century philosophical analysis of Augustinian modalities was put forward by Robert Grosseteste (d. 1253; Lewis 1996). Grosseteste taught that while things are primarily called necessary or possible ‘from eternity and without beginning’ with respect to God’s eternal knowledge, there are necessities and impossibilities with a beginning in God’s providence which are eternal contingencies in the sense that God could have chosen their opposites (De libero arbitrio 168.26–170.33, 178.24–29). One of the theses of twelfth-century authors, later called nominales, was that ‘What is once true is always true’. It was argued that while tensed statements about temporally definite singular events have a changing truth-value, the corresponding non-tensed propositions are unchangingly true or false, without being necessarily true or false for this reason (Nuchelmans 1973, 177–189; Iwakuma and Ebbesen 1992). This was in agreement with Abelard’s view that future contingent propositions are true or false. The actuality of a contingent state of affairs at a specified future time does not exclude the non-temporalized possibility of simultaneous alternatives, nor does the truth of a proposition about this state of affairs make it necessary (Abelard, Glossae super Peri hermeneias IX, 520–577; see also Peter of Poitiers (d. 1205), Sententiae I.7.133–43, I.12.164–223, I.14, 328–353).