Social networking appears to be expanding our circles of friendship just as our sense of community is contracting: Dr Thomas Dixon presents a timely history of how the meaning and experience of friendship have changed over the centuries.

Having launched the series by exploring the close-knit but instrumental friendships which most people experienced in the 16th and 17th centuries, Dr Thomas Dixon turns to the elite ideal of friendship as expressed in classical writers such as Aristotle and Cicero, and as lived out by Renaissance men such Thomas More and Erasmus.

He looks into the continuing influence of these emotional "friendships of choice". Today we take such friendships for granted but in the seventeenth century they were available only to those who had the time, money and education to pursue them.

It was commonly believed that only men had the capacity for such friendships but Thomas Dixon reveals how women too were beginning to spread their social wings. He tells the story of the Welshwoman Katherine Philips, a published poet and the wife of a wealthy landowner, who argued that since the soul has no gender, then friendship - a mingling of souls - was equally available to both men and women.

Producer: Beaty Rubens

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in March 2014.