R. Desmed's 1979 review in Latomus assesses Catherine M. Dunn's edition of Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie of Artes and Sciences, the Elizabethan English translation of Agrippa's De incertitudine first published by James Sanford in 1569. Desmed evaluates the editorial apparatus of the Dunn edition from the perspective of a classicist working on the Neo-Latin tradition, assessing both the accuracy of the edition and its contribution to the study of Agrippa's reception in sixteenth-century England.

The Sanford translation is important for the history of Agrippa's English reception: published in 1569, it predates the English translation of the DOP by more than eighty years and ensured that Elizabethan readers encountered Agrippa primarily as a sceptic and reformer rather than as an occult philosopher. Desmed notes that the Dunn edition provides the editorial tools necessary to study this reception: a reliable text, a glossary of Elizabethan vocabulary, and a contextual introduction placing the translation within the history of Elizabethan humanism.

The review also comments on the difficulty of editing a Renaissance translation accurately: Sanford's translation is not word-for-word but interpretive, and the editor must decide how much to correct Sanford's departures from the Latin original and how much to preserve them as evidence of how a sixteenth-century reader understood Agrippa's text. Desmed finds Dunn's editorial choices generally judicious and the apparatus adequate for scholarly use, while noting a few places where the Latin text underlying the translation has been misidentified.