The French historian Jacques Le Goff, who has died aged 90, specialised in the middle ages, which he defined – taking the long view – as stretching from the 5th to the 18th centuries. His case was that the period had a character of its own, and should not be seen as paving the way to modern times: it was during the medieval era, he argued, that Christianity, modern languages, towns, universities and the idea of Europe all emerged. He also acknowledged the cruelties and injustices of the period.
Le Goff's historiographical approach was based on that used by Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel in the influential journal Annales, emphasising long-term social history, ideas, and the conditions of ordinary people, rather than more traditional political or military themes.
His earliest books, Merchants and Bankers in the Middle Ages (1956) and Intellectuals in the Middle Ages (1957), were on conventional subjects but took a fresh approach in highlighting the importance of towns. Universities were located in towns, so intellectuals were as much a part of the urban scene as those engaged in commerce.
The title of Pour un Autre Moyen Age (1977) expressed Le Goff's aim of remoulding historical approaches to the era. He was heavily influenced by social anthropology, which gave him insights into human relations and ways of thinking. The Birth of Purgatory (1981) showed how the adoption of the doctrine that souls after death spent time in an intermediate state before judgment had wide-reaching social implications. The living could influence the time spent in purgatory and this gave rise to an elaborate infrastructure of funding for clergy who prayed for the souls of the departed.
Le Goff also published books and essays on the subjects of time, imagination, usury and memory – now commonplace, but then new ground broken by an author who regarded traditional histories of events as boring. In taking this all-encompassing perspective, he lived up to Bloch's maxim that a good historian should resemble the ogre of legend in hunting human flesh: all aspects of humanity should be subjected to historical inquiry.
Contemporary admirers of the Annales approach were disapproving of Le Goff's decision to write biographies of Louis IX of France (1996), a model king who was canonised, and St Francis of Assisi (1999). They need not have worried that he was reverting to an outmoded form of historical writing: only a third of the Louis book was devoted to a narrative of events; the rest consisted of analysis of cultural dimensions of kingship, religion and family.
Le Goff's ideas were formed from the circumstances of his life. He was born in Toulon to an anti-clerical schoolteacher father, who had fought in the first world war, and a mother who was a left-leaning Roman Catholic piano teacher. Jacques understood Catholicism but was attracted by his father's republican virtues. As a boy he supported the Popular Front, and when France was occupied during the second world war he went into the hills.
He developed an interest in the middle ages early in life from reading Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and built on that enthusiasm after the war as a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he encountered such influential figures as Braudel and Maurice Lombard. After some short-term academic jobs, in 1960 he was appointed a professor and then director of the sixth section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (later renamed the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), and in 1972 its president. In France he was known not only for his books and broadcasting – for a long time he had a weekly history programme on the radio – but for his republican idealism and his European outlook, his studies and research having taken him to Czechoslovakia, the UK, Italy and Poland. His works were translated into English and many other European languages. He acted as a historical adviser for the film The Name of the Rose (1986) and was honoured with the gold medal of the state-funded research institute the Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique (1991).
An event in June 1986 points to the prominence of academic historians in public life in parts of mainland Europe. A large audience, including Le Goff, had gathered at the Sorbonne in Paris for a lecture by the Polish historian Bronisław Geremek on Bloch as "historian and member of the resistance". Geremek failed to arrive from Poland, but his text did. Bloch, shot by the occupying forces in 1944, is remembered as a hero; Geremek went on to be Poland's foreign minister; and Le Goff delivered the latter's account of the former with a passion that is still remembered by those who were there.
In 1962 Le Goff had married Anna Dunin-Wasowicz, a Polish child psychiatrist. He was hit hard by her death in 2004, but continued to write from his small Paris flat. He is survived by his children, Barbara and Thomas.
• Jacques Louis Le Goff, historian, born 1 January 1924; died 1 April 2014