My project deals with the “origins” of thirteenth-century Franciscan architecture in Tuscany, looking to two eleventh-century Gregorian Reform monastic orders—the Vallombrosans and the Camaldolese—as spiritual and architectural models. My hypothesis is that the Franciscan movement is a renewal of the earlier Gregorian monastic spiritual ideals, expanding and adjusting the spiritual aims of “caring for souls” and service to the community to fit a new range of devotional and cultural needs. While previous scholarship has seen Franciscan architecture as simplistic, vernacular halls for preaching, I argue that the friars’ churches are better understood as spaces designed to both house and express the devotional practices of the friars and of the laity.