I am quite pleased to have been asked to write a guest post for the MMA Blog. I am Mark Mueller, presently enrolled in the Classics department’s Masters program. Over the last summer, I volunteered to do some translation work for the McMaster Museum of Art. The Museum has provided me with a number of artworks containing Latin inscriptions. As I received the works to translate, I have been documenting the work on my own blog.

What the Museum provided are prints of 16th and 17th century engravings, each containing a line or two of Latin, although one print contained a longer selection of Latin. They are typically Biblical scenes, which makes them doubly interesting to me, having majored in Religious Studies in my undergrad here at McMaster, with a particular interest in Biblical scholarship.

I was most taken with a series that depicted scenes from the deutero-canonical book, Bel and the Dragon. This is one of a number of stories of Daniel, who is also featured in the books, Susanna, and of course, Daniel. He was a kind of Biblical folk hero about whom many stories were told. Some Christian churches, such as the Roman Catholic, accept these extra Daniel stories as canonical, but most don’t. In this tale, Daniel disabuses King Cyrus, of Persia, of belief in the titular gods, first Bel and then the Dragon. But while the story depicted in the prints interested me, so did the Latin. There were occasional differences in the medieval Latin from the Classical Latin that I’m more accustomed to. Many changes were introduced into Latin during the Middle-Ages, and it even became rather regionalized, influenced by the local languages. The Latin of Germany had differences from the Latin of England or the Latin of France. On several occasions, there were even small mistakes in the Latin. I confess that as a student who often struggles with difficult texts, it gave me some comfort to know that these writers sometimes tripped up on relatively simple details.