The “medieval” period stretches from the rise of Islam, about 650 AD, to the full establishment of the Ottoman Empire in about 1500. In the Late Classical Period of 400-500 AD, just before the Early Medieval, Europe was heavily forested and generally wild and dangerous. The Gauls, Britons, and recently-arriving Germans (Saxons, Goths, Franks) created small settlements along the rivers and generally avoided the deep, vast forests. The European climate had been relatively warm during the Roman period, but during the Late Classical/Early Medieval, it was relatively cooler (until about 950). It was a great time to be a wolf in Europe.
Medieval man would have been astonished at Yellowstone Park’s choice to reintroduce wolves. In people’s minds at that time, wolves were entirely wicked. Wolves came out of the forest to take domesticated — and expensive — animals like cattle and sheep. They were so large that ordinary farm dogs couldn’t mount a real defense, and a pack of them could do real damage to an armed human, too. Needless to say, deep in the forest, a pack of wolves could annihilate unarmed humans. Not only that, but wolves carried rabies, so medieval people believed that a wolf’s bite was venomous. There are mammals with venom, but wolves are not among them. Still, nobody was going to get close enough to find out.
Wolves had thick fur, but they also had a distinctive smell. Very few people would wear wolf’s skin as a coat or have it anywhere near their houses. A man who wore a wolf’s fur collar was sending a message; if you meet such a man in a book of fantasy or historical fiction, rest assured that he is a Bad Guy. He probably lives in a remote castle and robs travelers.
Nobody hunted wolves for sport. They were only killed to get rid of their predation, so poison was favored. Two flowering plants in Europe were called wolf’s bane: Aconitum, which was also called “wolf’s bane” in Greek, and Arnica montana, which also acted as a painkiller in small amounts and used topically.
Because wolves were considered evil and uncanny, their bones or fur could also be used for magic. This would apply especially in cases of healing wolf-bite, where the thing that caused harm was presumed to have power to cure it. Similarly, if a leaf or flower looked like a wolf’s head, it would be tried for curing an infected wolf bite.
Their magical power may be why, hated as wolves were, “wolf” was a very common name element. We see it in Germanic names, some of which have lasted into modern times, like Rudolf, Rolf (Ralph), and Adolf, and many more that stayed in the medieval period: Fridolf, Ethelwulf, Eadwulf, and Wulfgar. But we don’t realize that we’re seeing “wolf” also in Irish names that have “con,” for wolf or dog, like Connor, Conan, and Connery, and maybe also as “chan” in Channing. (List of wolf-related names, not very carefully curated, here.)