The paper aims to give the results of initial research on the collection of incunabula from the St John’s church in Gdańsk. The collection constitutes significant part of PAN Biblioteka Gdańska. The author reconstructed the size and contents of the collection on the basis of the original church catalogues, marks of ownership and the physical details of the items. The books were gathered in the St John’s church from the time of the collections foundation until the 20th century. The paper establishes also the losses sustained by St John’s church’s library during World War II. Thanks to the incunabula’s content analysis the author determines the thematic focal points of the collection.

The article presents a selection of 15th century printed matters on the topic of broadly understood medicine, which are currently kept by the Gdansk PAS Library. They testify to the Gdansk culture in the area of the knowledge on health and hygiene in the 15th century and in a slightly later period. The majority of the said printed matters originate from the collections of Gdansk church libraries, while the presence of items of other origin (private owners) makes it possible to trace the road medical incunabula came to Gdansk to finally find their way to the resources of the Gdansk library.
The author of the article explains the modesty of the Gdansk medical literature resources with the fact that there was not a single university functioning in the city by the River Motlawa in the early modern period. The presence of this kind of incunabula in church libraries and private collections of books indicates that the knowledge they contained was applied for personal use rather than in professional medical practice, although some of the items in question originate from book collections belonging to doctors.

The medieval manuscripts of St. Mary’s Church Library ( Biblioteka Mariacka) are the oldest part of the collections of the Gdansk Library, with some items dating back to the 12th century. In view of their topics and history, they provide a priceless testimony to the history of Pomerania. The value of the manuscripts lies not only in their contents and ornamentation, but also in the fact that they include parchment documents bound by Gdansk bookbinders, which have survived in an excellent condition. The uniqueness of the collection was confirmed by the missal Missale secundum notulam dominorum Teutonicorum (Ms. Mar. F 332) being entered on UNESCO’s “Memory of the World” Polish National Register in 2016.
After 1921, not a single study discussing the provenance of books kept in St. Mary’s Church Library was written. This paper is an attempt to partially fill in the gap – to indicate the scribes and owners of the most valuable manuscripts. Among the latter, special attention should be devoted to clergymen connected with St. Mary’s church: Andreas Slommow, Heinrich Calow, and Johannes Zager, a lawyer Nicolaus Velan, and a scribe Johannes Rasoris from Nidzica.
For the purposes of this article, books kept by the Library were divided into sections: theology, philosophy, law and medicine; manuscripts related to the Teutonic Order were also given a separate section. Such a division may help the readers use the library holdings. The text also discusses the most important wartime losses.