Enlarged diagram on f68v2-f68v1?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

We have no information that the book was bought by anyone in the 15th century.

And I did not mean that it was sold (although we cannot possibly know that at this point).

I meant that the Author (who possibly was a bit stressed financially at the time) presumably thought that he could make some money from his transcription transliteration transcription.  And that hope would be what drove him to turn it into an illustrated vellum book.   Objectively, it should have been very valuable to some scholars -- even if they could not read it right away, or if the attached Voynichese-Latin glossary was only two pages long.

By the way, one of its owners (Barshius, I think) said that the book was useless to him and only took up space in the library. I assume that this was how she was perceived at the time

He did refer to it that way -- but then offered his own "origin theory" (the first one we have on record): 

... From the pictures of herbs, of which there are a great many in the codex, and of varied images, stars and other things bearing the appearance of chemical symbolism, it is my guess that the whole thing is medical, the most beneficial branch of learning for the human race apart from the salvation of souls. This task is not beneath the dignity of a powerful intellect. After all, this thing cannot be for the masses as may be judged from the precautions the author took in order to keep the uneducated ignorant of it. In fact it is easily conceivable that some man of quality went to oriental parts in quest of true medicine (he would have grasped that popular medicine here in Europe is of little value). He would have acquired the treasures of Egyptian medicine partly from the written literature and also from associating with experts in the art, brought them back with him and buried them in this book in the same script. This is all the more plausible because the volume contains pictures of exotic plants which have escaped observation here in Germany.

Your Reverence shines with ardour to bring the best things to light. I do hope you will not consider it beneath you to act for the common good and bring forth the good (if any there is) buried in unknown characters in this book. ...

 

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Thus Barschius did in fact think that the book might contain valuable information, if only it could be deciphered.  So much so that he refused to send the book itself to Kircher, sending instead faithful copies of some pages (as he says in that letter). 

(By the way, from that letter we can also infer that, by ~1630, there was no legible annotation on the book that could have identified its author and nature; and any attachments that might have accompanied the book, like a glyph pronunciation table or glossary, had been lost before the book got to Barschus.)

All the best, --stolfi