James Sanford's 1569 English translation of Agrippa's De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum, published in London as Of the Vanitie and Vncertaintie of Artes and Sciences, is the first substantial English version of any of Agrippa's writings and an important document in the history of his reception in Elizabethan England. The Garland facsimile reprint, which preserves the text in its original typography and binds it with two related texts — the Elizabethan poem "Hero and Leander" and a brief piece "The Art of Leaping in Poetry" — is the form in which the text entered the scholarly collection under study here.

The translation appeared during a period of significant interest in humanist scepticism in Elizabethan England. The 1560s saw increased engagement with Continental humanist debates, and Agrippa's exhaustive critique of the arts and sciences spoke to a readership familiar with both the Erasmian tradition of learned folly and the growing conflict between scholastic authority and Reformed humanism. Sanford's translation, which runs to several hundred pages in the Elizabethan quarto format, was a substantial undertaking that ensured English readers would encounter Agrippa first as a sceptic rather than as an occultist.

The translation's quality is characteristic of Elizabethan practice: broadly faithful to the Latin original in sense, while taking liberties with syntax and occasionally supplementing the text with brief explanatory glosses. The Elizabethan vocabulary gives some passages an energy and directness that the Latin lacks: Sanford's rendering of Agrippa's attacks on academic pedantry and professional hypocrisy has a satirical snap appropriate to the content. Students of Elizabethan prose style have noted the translation's place in the development of English expository prose alongside More's translations, Golding's Ovid, and other mid-sixteenth-century exercises in English from the Latin.

For Agrippa scholarship, the translation is primarily interesting as evidence for how the work was read in England: the decision to translate De incertitudine rather than (or long before) the DOP shaped English understanding of Agrippa's intellectual project for over a century, until the 1651 Freake translation finally made the occult philosophy available to English readers. The Desmed review (1979) of Catherine Dunn's modern edition of the Sanford text provides the most detailed scholarly assessment of the translation's quality and historical significance.