 A third context of the systematic interest in simultaneous alternatives was the new twelfth-century theory that declarative singular statements or their contents should be primarily treated as temporally definite and as having an unchanging truth-value. All propositional contents pertaining to contingent things have a truth-value on the basis of God’s eternal choice. These truth-values would be otherwise if the providential design of the world were different in relevant respects. Robert Grosseteste (1168/75–1253) taught that the opposites of actualized contingent things are no longer realizable possibilities, though they are possible alternatives in the sense that they could have been included in God’s eternal providential choice. Actual history is an explication of one of the divine alternatives with respect to which things are primarily called necessary, possible or impossible. Necessities and possibilities at this basic level are called modalities ‘from eternity and without beginning’. Mathematical truths exemplify these ‘simple’ necessities. In addition, there are necessities and impossibilities which have a beginning and which are eternal contingencies in the sense that they depend on God’s free choice (De libero arbitrio 168.26–170.33; 178.28–29). The contingency of the divine acts of knowledge and will is associated with an atemporal causal priority between the powers and their acts (178.24–26). Grosseteste’s views are compared with those of Duns Scotus in Lewis (1996).