The Age of the Wolf

Wolves are returning. Yet along with their tracks, ancient fears, never fully allayed, resurface. The Age of the Wolf guides us through historical documents and legends up to the present day, to the macabre discoveries of wolves hanged in Italian forests. Enemy to be hunted, incarnate evil, a danger to livestock: As urbanization advanced and forests gave way to fields, wolves were hunted by armies or by farmers, often for compensation from public institutions. More than five thousand wolves were killed in France alone in 1797, with similar massacres perpetrated in Germany, England, and Italy, extending from the Middle Ages to the present. Riccardo Rao reconstructs this ancestral fear with a journey through history, literature, psychology, and biology—from the Asturian woman who commanded wolf packs in the seventeenth century, to the German boy raised by wolves in the fourteenth century, to the famous story of the little girl in the red riding hood who was seized by a wolf and led into the heart of the forest around the year 1000. Ultimately, The Age of the Wolf reveals how popular superstition, the learned culture of churchmen, and major environmental transformations created the myth of the European wolf. A myth more relevant than ever.