Interpolation as Critical Category

Abstract:Maligned by ancient Alexandrian librarians and twentieth-century philologists alike, interpolation has a long history of negative criticism that obscures its ubiquity and utility in the medieval period. This article first tells the story of criticism of interpolation, using the Latin verb interpolare as a through-line across centuries of commentary. In this vision, the consensus is that interpolations must be detected in order to be eliminated. The trouble with this story is that deleting interpolations suppresses the very idea that texts were open to such interruptive revisions; by erasing embedded texts, these editors quietly do away with an important part of medieval textual culture. To get around this problem, the article then proposes an alternative story in which medieval practices of interpolation reflect flexible attitudes toward authorship and textual unity. Drawing on Derrida's idea of the parergon, I argue for the inextricability of so-called extraneous material from the work itself. Ultimately, interpolation is revealed to be an indispensable aspect of medieval textual culture that has been unjustly sidelined because of a long history of misunderstanding it as an attack on textual integrity, rather than as a deep form of interpretive engagement.