The Message Interpolation forces recursive message interpolation and combines this with a dependency on missing message value exceptions.

In Spring you can configure a message source to return the value of the message key if the key isn't found.

This combines with Validator's recursive message algorithm to turn

Must be between

and

into

Must be between min and max

This worked in earlier versions of Hibernate Validator and I'm ashamed to say this creeped up on us.

I can't see a workaround because recursiveness is forced (why? Seems pretty edge case to me). A solution would be to process value interpolation before recursive message interpolation. For now, I'll just copy-hack the messageinterpolator