The proposed project analyses the connections between architectural theory and practice in fifteenth- to seventeenth-century France. The project focuses on Philibert Delorme’s architectural treatise, the Premier tome de l’architecture (1567), in relation to early modern architectural theory across Europe, French practice in the late medieval and early modern times and the modes of transmission of architectural knowledge before (and aside from) theory and the emergence of a new professional figure of the architect as construed in early modern theoretical discourse across Europe and as experienced in French early modern practice.