Vast numbers of readers around the world who would never have expected to read a scholarly monograph on the life of a Pyrenean village in the 14th century did so thanks to the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who has died aged 94. The book was Montaillou, Village Occitan de 1294 à 1324 (1975).

It was published in English as Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (1978), and for those readers the work was like a French, real-life Canterbury Tales. Here were racy descriptions of the lives and loves, the intrigues and the attitudes of people who had really existed.

As often as not, the words were uttered as if at the 14th-century equivalent of the hairdressers: as a mistress deloused her lover, as the daughter deloused her mother, or as the servant girl might delouse the master of the household. Indeed, what better occasion to talk? What hinted at a more sinister purpose, however, was the fact that the gossip often concerned the womanising clergyman, the widow of the local feudal lord and their families, and was extracted direct from a homosexual priest, or a rebellious shepherd.

The evidence of the goings-on at Montaillou came from a record in the Vatican library of the Inquisition investigations of Cathar heresy, carried out by Jacques Fournier, the bishop of Pamiers who would later become Pope Benedict XII. These investigations had been known to historians interested in heresy since the turn of the 20th century.

Then, in 1965, part of the Latin record of many of the interrogations became more easily available. In that year, the historian Jean Duvernoy produced an edited version of the register.

So Le Roy Ladurie was not the discoverer, but the historically imaginative interpreter who showed Fournier to have been a real political anthropologist, determined to understand not just possible heresy but the villagers’ way of life, including their relationships with the powers of church and state.

He retranslated the register entries for the village of Montaillou and its neighbour, Prades, and mined them for ethnographic data such as attitudes to life and death, crime and punishment, family and kinship, God and magic. Le Roy Ladurie himself was almost to ignore the tragedies that lay behind the Inquisition, for what he had was extraordinarily powerful material to deepen his analysis of the impact of social structures, of the temporal powers of church and state, and of the timeless power of climate and geography on village life.

By the time Montaillou was published, Le Roy Ladurie was in his mid-40s. He had behind him his thesis, published in 1966 as Les Paysans de Languedoc (and in English in 1974); a study of the climate in the year 1000 (1967); a volume in the History of Rural France series; and the first volume of an acclaimed work of historiography, Le Territoire et l’Historien (1973, published in English in 1979).

These had shown his evolution as, first and foremost, an Annales historian, the school of French history associated, from the end of the 1920s, with Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre and, later, Fernand Braudel.

Le Roy Ladurie had gone to Montaillou to see what light he could throw on 14th-century village life, and to bring a new element to the broad-sweep social historical studies of his peers.

Like them, he shared the view that historical explanation should emerge from the interlocking relationship of different strata of time: the longue durée of geography and climate; the social time of mentalités or collective mental attitudes, and that of political events. But, as he put it, many such studies lacked the “regard direct” of evidence from contemporary witnesses.

The Peasants of Languedoc was built around quantitative data on tithes, other taxes and wages over two centuries. But in it he was also showing how the territory of the historian could be expanded by drawing on the social sciences and also – as Montaillou was to illustrate – anchoring the history in its specific ethnographic context. For the general readers of Montaillou, however, the scholarly purpose and research strategy were irrelevant. They were simply captivated by what the villagers had had to say.

Born in Les Moutiers-en-Cinglais, Normandy, Emmanuel was the son of Léontine (nee Dauger) and Jacques Le Roy Ladurie, a farmer and agriculture minister in the second world war Vichy collaborationist government who then joined the French resistance. Emmanuel went from the local lycée in Caen to the grand Paris establishment Henri-IV, and then the École Normale Supérieure.

As future academics did at the time, he began as a teacher, in 1955 in Montpellier. In 1957 he obtained a research post in the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, and in 1960 became a junior lecturer at the University of Montpellier.

In 1963, he joined the École Pratique des Hautes Études. After the 1968 upheavals he had a post at what became the University Paris VII, progressing to a chair there in 1970. In 1973 he was elected to the chair of modern civilisation at the Collège de France, in succession to Braudel. He held this post until he retired, aged 70, in 1999. He served as administrator of the Bibliothèque Nationale (1987-94) and was also a member of the Institut de France’s Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, and contributed regularly to public debate.

He produced other microhistories in the later 70s and 80s, though none had quite the same impact as Montaillou. These were Le Carnaval de Romans (1980); Jasmin’s Witch, published in English in 1987 and The Beggar and the Professor (1997).

In later years he turned his attention to the top echelons, with The Royal French State 1460-1610 (1994), and The Ancien Régime: A History of France 1610-1774 (1996); continued to reflect on the historian’s function with L’Historien, le Chiffre et le Texte (1997); and published work on climate history including Les Fluctuations du Climat de l’An Mil à Aujourd’hui (2011). His final book, Brève Histoire de l’Ancien Régime, was published in 2017.

As such a prominent historian, he had his share of professional criticism. But what may have affected him more were press attacks related to his father. In 1945, aged 16, the son joined the French Communist party, remaining a member until 1956, leaving over the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian revolution. He became a member of the soft left PSU (Parti Socialiste Unifié), before also becoming disillusioned with the socialists. The issues of totalitarianism and liberty clearly haunted him. He analysed his political engagement in at least three publications.

I interviewed Le Roy Ladurie shortly after Montaillou came out in English. I remember a quiet and courteous man in a sunny Paris apartment, a harmonious atmosphere enhanced by a piano-playing daughter practising in the background. The only time he raised his voice was when I asked the naive question – which then obsessed journalists – about using computers to extend the possibilities of historical research. He quite rightly snapped: “Rubbish in, rubbish out.” This was not a fault to be laid at the door of this illuminating and widely translated historian.

He was a grand officer of the Légion d’Honneur and a commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

In 1956 he married Madeleine Pupponi, a physician. They had a son and a daughter.

• Emmanuel Bernard Le Roy Ladurie, historian, born 19 July 1929; died 22 November 2023