Though not among the most famous of the Baroque’s architects and builders, the Bregenzerwald Baroque Master Builders, who were heavily involved in the creation of a sacred landscape of churches and monasteries in the wider Lake Constance area, have attracted scholarly attention since the nineteenth century. This article attempts to recontextualize these builders by taking them out of the usual framework proposed by art historians who, not least due to a chance discovery of an important source in the mid-twentieth century, tended to interpret the remote alpine valley of the Bregenzerwald as some kind of “rustic Florence.” Instead, this article rereads these builders in the context of the more mundane social and political realities of the Bregenzerwald. It suggests that in order to better understand this fascinating group of builders and craftsmen, it may be helpful to avoid reconstructing their sociopolitical history from their artistic achievement (How were they able to accomplish this?), and instead to reverse this approach to uncover the sociopolitical structures in which they lived (Who were they before they accomplished this?).