INTERPOLATIONS. — Alterations introduced into a transmitted text. In Romanistic scholarship, interpolations are the modifications made in legislative and jurisprudential texts, normally in order to bring them up to date with the law in force at the time when the alteration was made.
Since the greatest number of such modifications is found in the Corpus iuris civilis (v.), interpolations, from the time of the culti onward, were given the name emblemata Triboniani, after the quaestor sacri palatii of Justinian who presided over the work of codification.
The first researchers into interpolations were precisely the culti, among whom Fabro, Cuiacio, Wissembach, Eckhard, and Meister should be remembered. Of the last two it was rightly said that they were the first to establish the doctrine of interpolations. This research was not, however, pursued further, since the Corpus iuris civilis was not then the object of historical study, as it is today, but served as the basis for practical activity (usus modernus Pandectarum). An Italian jurist, Ilario Alibrandi (1823–1894), used the critical method in his writings; and in Germany, toward the end of the last century, Lenel employed it in his reconstruction of the Edictum perpetuum, while Gradenwitz established, in his work Die Interpolationen in den Pandekten (1887), the scientific criteria for such research.
These criteria, elaborated in Italy and elsewhere by an illustrious group of Romanists, are, in summary, the following: textual, historical, logical, juridical-logical, methodological or systematic, philological, exegetical, and diplomatic. The use of these methods of research is extremely difficult and delicate, and the excesses of more recent researchers have provoked the equally exaggerated reaction, at times, of those who seek to ascribe no great importance to interpolations.
A list has been compiled of the interpolations found in the Digesto, completed in 1933 (Index interpolationum quae in Iustiniani Digestis inesse dicuntur). A work that should be mentioned separately is the Behräge zur Kritik der röm. Rechtsquellen by G. Beseler, in which a great many interpolations are identified.
For alterations of another kind made in canonical sources, V. PSEUDO-ISIDORO.