Shared devotions: non-Latin responses to Latin sainthood in late medieval Cyprus.

Convergence among religious rites has long been a favoured subject of study among historians of the Latin East, who have come at it from a variety of different angles, exploiting a wide array of evidence ranging from papal correspondence to works of art. At the level of popular devotion to saints and relics, research has focused on Latin piety expressed towards local Christian cults, relics and pilgrimage sites mainly in the Holy Land and Cyprus. However, the reverse – the devotion Greeks and other Eastern Christians exhibited towards cults and relics of Latin provenance – has been but little explored. This paper examines non-Latin reactions to the emergence of two ‘indigenous’ Latin cults in fourteenth-century Cyprus, those of the Carmelite Peter Thomae and Count John of Montfort. It will be argued that the cults evolved through time in response to the expectations and needs of a ‘Cypriot’ urban public, comprised of both Latins and Greeks of a high social standing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]