J. Koch placed Durandellus in the “front rank” of Dominican opponents of Durandus of Saint-Pourçain, and called his Evidentiae“the fullest and best” Thomist critique of the first version of Durandus's commentary on the Sentences (Durandus de S. Porciano OP, Münster 1927 p. 340); yet, for lack of a printed text, this work has received little attention. The lack has now been magnificently remedied thanks to Prospero Stella, who has given us a model edition. After a brief discussion of the author's identity (called Nicolaus Medensis in one manuscript) and the date of his work (he suggests 1325–6 on rather flimsy grounds), he gets down to business. There is a meticulous account of each manuscript's contents and quirks, and an exhaustive study of the textual tradition as a whole. Because this is so complex, he has noted all the variants of all 13 manuscripts in his apparatus – which is desirable anyway, since precise investigation of Durandellus's influence requires the fullest possible information about the forms, however degenerate, in which his work was available to readers. Not content with identifying sources, he quotes in full those which are most essential to each section: the appropriate item, if any, from Dominican masters’ lists of Durandus's “errors”(which Durandellus certainly used), the main passages of Aquinas to which Durandellus refers, and, most importantly, the relevant texts from Durandus (which Stella takes from the manuscripts since there is no edition of the first version of Durandus's commentary).

Modern printers are no more capable than medieval scribes of producing error-free texts, and there are some misprints, but I have not noticed any which an intelligent reader should not be able to correct.

An edition of Durandellus is obviously of interest chiefly to historians of medieval thought: his scholastic pedantry, though expressed with admirable clarity, is not to the taste of most moderns. All the same, he tackles some issues of continuing importance, such as the question whether grace creates a proportionality between good deeds and heavenly rewards which justifies talk of meriting de condigno. Durandellus defends Aquinas's affirmative answer, and he specifically attacks Durandus's contention – a harbinger of the divine arbitrariness favoured by Nominalism – that God could deny glory to someone dying in a state of grace: God is not bound by anything other than himself, but his own self-consistency means that there is a pattern in his acts which we can, to some extent, understand; the link between “final grace” and glory is certain because it rests on his promise – but, of course, he has not promised “final grace”(pp. 618–9).

To take but one other example, an issue which crops up twice in the Evidentiae(pp. 32–53, 1402–1414), and also several times in Eckhart (cf Die deutschen Werke V, 131–2). Durandus espoused an opinion originally proposed by John of Paris in defence of Aquinas's intellectualist doctrine of beatitude (cf. J.P. Muller in Mélanges Auguste Pelzer, Louvain 1947, pp. 493–511): the formal object of beatitude is not God himself, but the mind's awareness of its own vision of God (just as, Durandus explains, it is not the wine which is the object of my enjoyment, but my drinking of wine). Our love of God is a kind of desire, and desire is satisfied by possession of the desired object, not by the object in itself. I side with Durandellus in wanting to say that I enjoy wine: my enjoyment of it may be inseparable from my enjoyment of drinking it, but if I did not enjoy wine I should not enjoy drinking it. Durandellus is also surely right not to allow love of God to be reduced to amor concupiscientiae; it is amor amicitiae and, as such, it rejoices in God's perfection in himself, not just in its own satisfaction.