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Bitter Bonds: A Colonial Divorce Drama of the Seventeenth Century. By LEONARD ELUSSE. Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2002. 194 + ix pp. $38.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paperback).
Six months after Cornelia van Nijenroode married Johan Bitter in 1676, the couple took the first step in what was to become an acrimonious dispute and separation that lasted for fifteen years. Their marital troubles, exacerbated by folly, greed, and deceit, took Cornelia from Batavia in what is now Indonesia to the Netherlands. Her story becomes the lens through which to view the history of the Dutch East India Company, the evolution of the legal and administrative system for the colony and Dutch relations with China and Japan, the role of the church, and the systematic gender inequality that characterized European law in the seventeenth century.
Born to a Japanese mother and a Dutch father on the island of Hirado around 1630, Cornelia was carried off to Batavia to be educated following her father's death in 1633. When the Japanese shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu severely restricted trade and contact with Europeans in 1639, Cornelia's sole access to her mother was through the mail. In 1652 she married the wealthy Pieter Cnoll and bore him nine children, all of whom died before her. His death in 1672...