Medieval Modalities Is There Still a Story to Tell? John Marenbon Trinity College, Cambridge Abstract: is essay is a critique of Simo Knuuttila’s history of medieval modal conceptions, according to which a «statistical» understanding of possibility and necessity was replaced by an idea of synchronic alternative states of affairs, the ancestor of our contemporary model of possible worlds. is idea, unknown in antiquity, owes its origin, Knuuttila argued, to belief in a God who acts by choice. I argue that there was no such change. In con- sidering the problem of divine prescience and contingency, Boe- thius is not, as Knuuttila maintained, misled by a statistical view of modality. Peter Damian’s treatment of God’s power of the past, and Anselm’s discussion of necessity are best seen as extensions of Boethius’s distinction between simple and conditional necessity, not as steps on the way to the development of synchronic mo- dalities. Only by taking passages out of context and misreading them can Gilbert of Poitiers be made into a forefather of possible worlds semantics. Scotus does, indeed, use – but it is not the first to do so – the idea of simultaneous opposite real powers of the will, but he does not develop this thinking into a theory of alter- native possible worlds. Keywords: ere is a widely accepted narrative about how modalities were conceived in the Middle Ages, in which the idea that possibili- per la curatrice: fornire pa- role chiave cortese- mente