Michela Pereira's review of the Perrone Compagni edition in Nuncius — the journal of the history of science published by the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence — assesses the edition from the perspective of a historian of Renaissance natural philosophy and alchemy. Pereira was herself a prominent scholar of medieval and Renaissance alchemy, and her review evaluates the edition's usefulness for those approaching the DOP as a document in the history of natural knowledge.

Pereira's review is generally enthusiastic about the edition's scholarly achievement: the critical apparatus, the introduction's treatment of the textual tradition, and the editor's handling of Agrippa's sources in natural philosophy and medicine. She notes that the edition makes available for the first time a reliable text that allows scholars to distinguish Agrippa's actual positions from the distortions introduced by later editions and by the long tradition of polemical appropriation, both hostile and sympathetic.

The review also makes the observation — important for the history of science — that the DOP's systematic treatment of the natural world as a hierarchy of powers and correspondences is not simply a relic of medieval animism but a serious attempt to provide a theoretical framework for a range of practical operations, from medical treatment to agricultural improvement. The concept of occult virtues in Book I reflects a genuine engagement with the problem of how natural effects can be produced by properties that are not accessible to ordinary observation — a problem that remained philosophically live until the seventeenth century.