I mean, really, why would it be encrypted?

[Stephen Carlson]

Would the VM be perceived (in the 15th cen.) as an encrypted text or an exotic language text?

It depends who's doing the perceiving, I guess. An experienced reader in the 15th century would recognize most of the characters as common ligatures, abbreviations, numbers... So my guess is that they would think someone's been messing around rather than it being some genuine foreign script.

I guess that depends on people's awareness of other foreign scripts, and of encrypted texts? If one only knew Latin, would the familiar-yet-strange nature of the script suggest another language or a code? And the embellishments, like the first letters of the paragraphs? I kind of assumed that it was meant to look like an exotic language, but now I'm less sure.