Regaining the lost order

[MichelleL11]

Anton, what you are proposing is one of the forms of scinderatio fonorum (see my blog You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. about Vigilius Maro). 
One of the "scinderations" he proposes is exactly this type of shuffling.
And indeed, it's hard, if not impossible, to recover the original meaning of the text if someone used this extensively.
Unless you already know the text to begin with.

It's also definitely discussed by Leon Battista Alberti in his You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. work (note this translation chapter access used to be free and is unfortunately isn't any longer).  Granted this is well after the VM carbon dating (1467), and as discussed by Nick, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. probably was only circulated within the Vatican staff responsible for encoding -- it can be seen as at least some discussion of what had been in use for ciphers, although it is uncertain how far back or how widespread the techniques disclosed were used.

In short, scrambling the order of the letters within words and words within lines are explicitly discussed.

 
   


Here is the part that is key for this discussion:

   

Poetic to be sure, but not particularly good for practical application.