Morten St George Theory

[Morten St. George]

A dot to turn something from capital to lowercase and vice versa? I've looked at thousands of medieval manuscripts and I have never seen such a thing.

It may be true that modern German capitalizes nouns, but it was not at all typical of medieval German. In fact, frequently they didn't capitalize sentences either and punctuation was often missing as well. Capitalization was not standardized and some manuscripts only used it for the names of people or saints and some only used capitals at the beginning of paragraphs.

I doubt if you can find a single example of a period being used to lowercase or uppercase a letter in a medieval manuscript.

Part of the problem seems to be an enormous disparity in time: I am claiming that the marginalia was written around the year 1600 and you seem to be thinking in terms of the year 1400. As I can see in the Fama Fraternitatis, written shortly after 1600, German did in fact capitalize its nouns at that time.

It is abundantly clear that the author of the marginalia did not want to be understood by the masses and, I’m sure, by the Inquisition in particular. He therefore employs various techniques for deception and disguise including truncated words and, apparently, the use of dots to change the case of letters. The fact that we find two instances of case reversal via dots, in opposite directions, makes it credible that he did this.