WHILE VISITING NEWYORK'S Pierpont Morgan Library one autumn afternoon, Barry Holstun Lopez ponderously ran his hands over the withered pages of four manuscripts containing a bestiary, a life of St Edmund, Dante's Divina commedia, and Pliny's Naturalis historia. Though these texts were united by neither provenance, theme, nor genre, all nevertheless possessed two commonalities of particular interest to Lopez. The first: each featured the wolf, the object of Lopez's research for his now-seminal book Of Wolves and Men. The second: these manuscripts were all ‘being either written or eagerly read’ during the Middle Ages, ‘a time’, Lopez considered, ‘when the wolf was distinctly present in folklore, in Church matters, and in the literature of the educated classes’.

Yet despite feeling ‘a stunning, almost electric sense of immediate communication with another age’, Lopez opined: ‘you cannot examine any of these books without sensing that you have hardly touched in them the body of human ideas concerning the wolf’. Rather, the wolf ‘seems to move just beneath the pages of these volumes, loping along with that bicycling gait, through all of human history’. Sometimes, it passes through the pages with scarcely a whisper, the subject of a figure of speech so well-known that the wolf disappears as suddenly as it entered, with a swish of the tail that scarcely disturbs the air. On other occasions, it lingers to withstand more detailed scrutiny as it stalks its next victim through dusky woodland, or tears chunks of flesh from slick, bloody corpses to the chorus of an unkindness of ravens.

Each text in which this animal appears contributes to the compendium of ‘men's wolf thoughts’ throughout history, a ‘long haunting story of the human psyche wrestling with the wolf’. As long as their howls have travelled over the land, this distinctive sound has sent chills down the spines of those who heard it, an audience who has been ‘alternately attracted to […] and repelled by’ its performers. From the hunter-gatherers whose symbiotic affiliation with wolves may have led to the animal's domestication, to the agrarian societies in which this co-operative relationship soured and turned to enmity, a multiplicity of meanings have been attached to the wolf by peoples from every place and time in which the two species have coexisted.