I'm a fantasy writer, and while I'm not trying too hard to be realistic about the setting, knowing history is never a bad thing. For the world I'm currently working on, dragons aren't particularly intelligent or anything, they're just large predatory animals.
I wanted to draw from real methods of bringing down large dangerous animals in figuring out how they would be hunted, though naturally it'll have to diverge a bit from that. A basis is always good, though.
For tech-level reference, the earliest guns have been invented in this world, but they haven't yet reached the country in which I'm telling stories.
Unfortunately there isn't a lot of source material on bear hunting as a lot of our late medieval 'hunting manuals' were produced in England...when the bear had been long extinct. However, the very famous 14th c hunting manual by Gaston Fébus, the Livre de chasse, features a chapter on hunting bear. In fact, Gaston is said to have died of stroke while washing his hands of bear blood; this would be a classic example of how we can't take the words of medieval writers about aristocracy at face value - they are always burnishing the image of the subject. As the count of Foix Gaston would have hunted in the Pyrenees where bears have roamed even until recently (and there is in fact a protest by farmers now against the planned re-introduction of bears). I don't know if his book has been translated to English - I've only seen editions of the various manuscript images with summaries.
Generally speaking, large animals were harried by horseback riders and hounds and driven into places that could be controlled: pits and traps. Hunters were on horseback and on foot, using weapons at a distance: bows and spears. It seems aristocrats were less interested in demonstrating strength than an ability to outwit their prey, whether bear, stag or wolf.
If you want to write about medieval hunting, try to find these two books: