Michael Freeman was a leading figure in French studies in Britain in a most dynamic periods. He brought to his scholarship a wry independence of spirit which reflected the detachment of a richly cultivated mind.

Michael John Freeman was born in North London in 1942. He was taught Esperanto by his uncle, an experience that kindled in him a passion for language and for languages. He attended Portuguese lessons at Canning House, and that launched him on a wider foray into Romance languages which was to be the bedrock of his subsequent career. He lived for extended periods in Lisbon and later in Paris.

He took a first degree in French and Portuguese at the University of Leeds, graduating in 1964 with a first. He then taught in Portugal for some years. His Portuguese, like his French, was flawless. The most convivial of men, he formed many friendships there: he threw himself into the literary and intellectual scene and formed a close bond with Mário Soares. Later, when Soares came to Britain as President of Portugal, Freeman acted as a friendly facilitator as he was presented with an honorary doctorate by the University of Leicester.

While he would maintain a constant scholarly commitment to Portuguese, his interests veered back to French, and he returned to Leeds, where in 1972 he completed a PhD on the 15th-century satirist Guillaume Coquillart, a poet who wrote for a learned audience on licentious themes using mock legal language.

The minute investigations of style and of sources which this entailed took Freeman to Paris where he became versed in philological and editorial techniques, skills that were to stand him in good stead in his editions of other no less singular writers, like the dramatist Jodelle, and in the flow of articles which displayed late medieval and Renaissance writings in a new light, owing to his flair for seizing on telling details, without ever losing sight of their context. In Paris he studied at the École des Chartes, where he met Jean Dérens, who would be a life-long friend and collaborator.

He became a lecturer at the University of Leicester in 1968. There he had the fortune to work in a flourishing department under the mentorship of F. W. J. Hemmings, and he embarked on a research career which was as remarkable for its range as for the enduring impact of his publications.

His interest in early French music found an outlet in his collaborations with David Munrow, then a colleague at Leicester, on his pioneering recordings with the Early Music Consort, for which Freeman wrote sleeve notes and provided expert editions and translations of often impenetrable texts.

The focus of Freeman’s later years was the poet François Villon. With Dérens, Jean Dufournet and others, he organised over a period of 15 years a series of conferences which proved to be seminal: the notoriously enigmatic qualities of Villon’s poetry, far from being explained away, revealed the poet’s project and the vicissitudes of its reception in a complex new light.

Freeman published a monograph on Villon in 2000. He showed how the poet, in consciously exploiting moral and literary themes of the day, fashioned an ambiguous persona, which, though historically rooted, proves to this day to have an unmistakeable poetic appeal. This Freeman sought to elucidate, often on the basis of striking rapprochements with modern poets.

Already holding a chair at Leicester, he was enticed to the University of Bristol in 1995, as the Ashley Watkins Professor of French. In this stage of his career he assumed a higher public profile. He was constantly in demand on appointments panels, as his subject witnessed a surge in new professorial posts. In 1997 he succeeded his close friend Professor Alan Raitt as general editor of French Studies, the leading English-language journal in the subject, and enjoyed a productive decade-long tenure. He opened the journal to scholarship in new areas, led the negotiation of a contract with Oxford Journals, and oversaw the publication online of the journal’s 60-year archive.

A superb editor, he took immense pride in the exemplary standards of style and presentation which French Studies continued to uphold, though he took care never to let slip how much time and commitment the production of a journal demanded.

In this, as in all of his work, he gave the impression of effortless serenity. A firm believer in the virtue of collegiality, he shunned self-importance. Few scholars who had the fortune to place their first article in a leading journal can have received the good news from the general editor in person.

Sustained by a refined cultivation of books, wine, music, good company, Freeman preserved an unflinching optimism. He wrote beguilingly on the “ubi sunt” topos — the transience of youth, beauty and life — and well knew that our joys are fleeting, and that life is short. He loved to comment on Villon’s famous line “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?” — where are the snows of yesteryear? — observing that even the things which make the deepest impression are destined to “be made dark by the shadow of yesterday”.

Of course, his own work, which brought long-neglected and misunderstood writings back to life, contradicted this outlook. And the personal impact of the man himself was no less vivid: any meeting with him brought a measure of light and cheer which will remain for many indelible.

Freeman is survived by his wife, Manuela, his constant companion for more than 40 years, and their son.

Professor Michael Freeman, French and Portuguese scholar, was born on April 20, 1942. He died of heart failure on April 30, 2009, aged 67