INTERPOLATIONS. – Alterations introduced into a transmitted text. In Romanist scholarship, these are the modifications made to legislative and jurisprudential texts, normally to bring them up to date with the law in force at the time the alteration was made.
Since the greatest number of such modifications are found in the Corpus iuris civilis (q.v.), these interpolations were, from the time of the glossators onwards, given the name of *emblemata Tribonianis*, from that of the *quaestor sacri palatii* of Justinian, who presided over the work of codification.
The first scholars to investigate interpolations were precisely the glossators, among whom are to be remembered Fabro, Ciuccio, Wisembach, Eckhard, and Meister, the last two of whom it has been accurately said founded for the first time the doctrine of interpolations. This research was, however, not pursued further, since the Corpus iuris civilis was not 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), employed the critical method in his writings; and in Germany, towards the end of the last century, Lenel used it in his reconstruction of the *Edictum perpetuum*, while the great Dernburg established, in his work *Die Interpolationen in den Pandekten* (1887), the scientific criteria for such research.
These criteria, developed in Italy and abroad by an eminent group of Romanists, are, in summary, as follows: the textual, the historical, the logical, the logical-juridical, the methodological or systematic, the philological, the exegetical, and the diplomatic. The use of these methods of research is extremely difficult and delicate, and the excesses of recent researchers have provoked a reaction, equally exaggerated at times, from those who would accord interpolations no great importance.
A list has been compiled of the interpolations found in the Digest, completed in 1933 (*Index interpolationum quae in Iustiniani Digestis inesse dicuntur*). A work to be noted separately is constituted by the *Beiträge zur Kritik der röm. Rechtsquellen* of G. Beseler, in which a great many interpolations are identified.
For alterations of another kind made to canonical sources, see PSEUDOISIDORO.