Daughters of Time: Women in the Western Tradition by Mary Kinnear offers a sweeping and insightful exploration of women’s roles, identities, and achievements throughout the history of Western civilization. Spanning from ancient societies to the twentieth century, Kinnear draws on social, cultural, and intellectual history to illuminate both the well-known and hidden contributions of women in Europe and North America.Structured both chronologically and thematically, the book investigates key moments and turning points in women’s history—from the family structures and gender norms of ancient Greece and Rome, through the medieval period and the Renaissance, to the movements for reform, political rights, and social change in modern times. Kinnear foregrounds women's experiences in work, politics, religion, and domestic life while also examining the evolution of broader social attitudes and institutional barriers.Thoughtfully engaging with the insights of feminist scholarship, Daughters of Time challenges the traditional exclusion of women from major historical narratives, revealing how the conceptual frameworks of Western philosophy and culture have both shaped and limited women’s lives. Kinnear highlights the tensions, contradictions, and progress marking women’s status and rights, and provides keen analysis of how concepts like equality, reform, collective action, and family have shaped the possibilities for women across generations.Accessible, rigorously researched, and rich with examples, Daughters of Time is an essential resource for anyone seeking to understand the complexity and significance of women’s history in the West, as well as the ongoing debates about gender, power, and social change.

Love and Friendship in the Western Tradition comprises a collection of essays written over a 25 year period by the late Rev. Professor James McEvoy on the theme of friendship. The book traces the genesis and development of philosophical treatments of friendship from Greek philosophy, through the Middle Ages, to modern and postmodern philosophy. The collection’s three major concerns are: (1) the history of philosophical discussions of friendship; (2) the role of friendship in the cultivation of the philosophical life; (3) the marginalization of friendship as a theme for philosophical reflection and practice in the modern period. As the author was primarily a medievalist, a great deal of the focus of the essays is on the development of the theme of friendship in the Middle Ages (in the thought of Augustine, Aquinas, Aelred of Rievaulx, Henry of Ghent, Robert Grosseteste, etc.). However, this focus, while a value in itself, also serves to connect philosophical perspectives on friendship from before and after the middle ages. It connects to the time before inasmuch as much of the work done on friendship in the Middle Ages is anchored in interpretations of Aristotle and Plato, and it connects to the time after by providing a counterpoint to the modern paradigm of what constitutes the philosophical life. The collection combines historical with thematic approaches to scholarship on this issue and is one of the only books of its kind to do so. It is, perhaps, unique in its historical sweep and will prove to be a canonical source for further research on this topic.