INTERPOLATIONS. - Alterations introduced into a transmitted text. In Romanist 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 the alteration was made.
Since the greatest number of such modifications are found in the Corpus iuris civilis (v.), interpolations, from the time of the glossators onward, were given the name emblemata Triboniani, after the quaestor sacri palatii of Justinian who presided over the work of codification.
The first researchers of interpolations were precisely the glossators, among whom mention should be made of Faber, Cujas, Wissembach, Eckhard and Meister, of the last two of whom it was rightly said that they were the first to found the doctrine of interpolations. This research was not, however, continued, since the Corpus iuris civilis was not an 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 the research.
These criteria, elaborated in Italy and abroad by a select group of Romanists, are, in summary, the following: the textual, the historical, the logical, the logical-juridical, the methodological or systematic, the philological, the exegetical, the diplomatic. The use of such methods of research is extremely difficult and delicate, and the excesses of recent researchers have provoked the reaction, sometimes equally exaggerated, of those who hold that interpolations are of no great importance.
A list has been drawn up of the interpolations detected in the Digest, completed in 1933 (Index interpolationum quae in Iustiniani Digestis inesse dicuntur). A work to be remembered separately is constituted by the Behräge zur Kritik der röm. Rechtsquellen of G. Beseler, in which very many interpolations are pointed out.
For alterations of another kind made in canonical sources, v. PSEUDOISIDORO.