OXFORD historian Philip Jones, whose controversial works questioned the significance of the Renaissance, has died aged 84.

He was born in London and educated at St Dunstan's College, Catford, where his teachers encouraged him to apply to Oxford.

After graduating with a first-class degree from Wadham College in 1945, having served a brief spell in the Army, he won a graduate scholarship at Magdalen College, Oxford.

In 1949, he took up a post as assistant in history at Glasgow University for a year before becoming a lecturer at Leeds University.

He was a Reader at the university from 1961 until 1963, when he moved to Brasenose College, Oxford.

He was a fellow and tutor in Modern History at the college until his retirement in 1989.

He met his future wife, Carla Susini, in Florence, while researching the Malatesta, the ruling family in late-medieval Rimini. The couple, who married in 1954, returned to Florence for the summer months for many years.

His first publication, in 1952, The Vicariate of the Malatesta of Rimini, was based on his doctoral research delving into archives in Rome, Florence and Rimini.

It is a political history extending from the 13th to the late 15th centuries not the kind of history for which he was later to gain distinction.

A series of later works, including Economy and Society in Medieval Italy: the myth of the bourgeoisie, published in 1980, challenged current thinking and caused considerable debate in Italy, where his work is much better known.

Long before the publication of his thesis he had turned his attention from political to economic and social history, devoting himself to two themes agrarian history and the character of the city state.

Medieval Italian agrarian history, unlike that of England and France, had been comparatively little studied because of the relative difficulty of handling the sources.

He argued that if a Renaissance did take place, it was a revival of the urban ruling class during the 12th and 13th centuries rather than a rebirth in painting and philosophy in the 15th century.

Part one of his book, The Italian City-State, was published in 1997, while part two remains unfinished.

He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1984 and received the Serena Medal for Italian studies in 1988.

Colleagues at Brasenose remember him for his wit, recalling anecdotes such as the time he complained at High Table when under-done liver was served that his was "still working".

On another occasion, a fellow don once remarked to him, "Who knows, Philip, perhaps you'll be regarded as a saint after you're dead", to which he replied, "God forbid".

He died in Oxford on Sunday, March 26, leaving a son and daughter. His wife died in 2004.