FIBER Festival

Cis van Heertum is affiliated to the Ritman Library in Amsterdam. She offers the audience a crash course on the history of alchemy.

Cis van Heertum (1958) is a curator at the Ritman Library, Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica (BPH), which brings together manuscripts and printed works in the field of the Hermetic tradition, more specifically the ‘Christian-Hermetic’ tradition.

As curator van Heertum is responsible for modern books from 1800 to present and runs the  library’s publishing house, In de Pelikaan. She joined BPH in 1991 after having worked as a curator at The British Library. She has curated a number of exhibitions for BPH, including Philosophia Symbolica (2005), to mark the 550th anniversary of the birth of the German humanist and Hebraist Johannes Reuchlin, and Libertas Philosophandi. Spinoza as a Guide to a Free World (2008), an exhibition organized on the occasion of Amsterdam’s election that year as Book Capital of the World. Cis van Heertum studied English literature at Nijmegen under Professor T.A. Birrell she was the last of his PhD students gaining a doctorate degree in 1989.