Permanent Renaissance

From what I can tell, Eisenstein is arguing in this chapter that renascences were doomed to be transitory until the coming of printing, because scribal culture could not provide the volume of texts needed to keep them going. But the Romans were able to keep their society, which was supposedly being reborn, going using manuscript technology. This argues that it could have worked. It's possible that the Romans had gone as far as anyone could go with a scribal culture.