The average (or presumably median) European would have been illiterate and would not have ventured more than a few miles from their place of birth within their lifetime, so if news of newly discovered lands reached them, it would have done so very slowly, and been distorted into implausible folktales of marvels and monsters.
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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Medieval Europe did have news, though, so it really depends about where you lived. Europe may be smaller than North America but it's certainly not small if all your means of travel revolves around horses or sails.
Merchants visited ports all over Europe, bringing stories and news with them. Those merchants would talk to traders, and traders would talk to people. Countries near seas would also have fishermen who would travel far out and visit various coastal towns. In the 1500s, printing presses were already in use for more than just large cities (Wikipedia has a nice map) so news could spread even faster, even if there were only a limited amount of people who could read in the first place.
It's not like Europeans were completely isolated from whatever was happening outside of their little towns. It took a couple of decades longer for stories to spread, but news spread among the people long before the modern newspaper existed.
I'd like to point out that the notion that most medieval Europeans never travelled beyond their place of birth is increasingly shown to be a misconception. Most peasants at least visited the nearest town frequently for trade and to attend processions for religious holidays, and many made a point of going on a major pilgrimage at least once in their live. There also the fact that people were often forced to relocate because of wars and famine, went on crusades, were sent away to learn a trade, or simply visited distant relatives. The thing that didn't happen was tourism, which is how we mostly think of travel today. Here's a medievalist's perspective on it, and it's not hard to find more sources if you go looking for them: https://medievallauren.wordpress.com/2020/12/02/medieval-myth-busting-travel/
New-worlder here. We definitely have monsters.
I'm gonna start refering to myself as a new-worlder now.