FREDEGISUS of Tours. – An English scholar, probably born in the last quarter of the 8th century (a letter from Alcuin in 798 calls him a “puer”), died in 834. He was a pupil of Alcuin first at York and then in the palace school of Charlemagne, where he later (early 9th century) held a chair. In 804 he was elected abbot of the monastery of St Martin in Tours, and in 819 he received the dignity of chancellor to Louis the Pious.
Besides some poems, he wrote in epistolary form the short treatise *De nihilo et tenebris* (PL 105, 751–50), in which he seeks to demonstrate that these two concepts correspond to an objective reality. Yet perhaps more than by the postulates of exaggerated realism, F. is led to this position by exegetical concerns about the relevant passages in the head of Genesis which seemed to him impossible to explain otherwise.
The importance of the *Epistola* for the history of philosophy lies in the fact that it constitutes one of the first examples, in scholasticism, of the dialectical method.