There is this tale of a Fryar Cornelius Adriaensen. He was a 16th-century Dutch Franciscan priest. He was born at Dordrecht (South Holland) in 1521 and joined the order of “Frères Mineurs”.

Adriaensen moved to Bruges (West Flanders, today in Belgium) where he founded a secret order among the women of Bruges, who were persuaded to meet him in secret, undress, and be chastised for their sins. The order was eventually betrayed to the local authorities by two unwilling novices, Betteken Maes and Celleken Pieters. Adriaensen fled Bruges in 1563 and died in Ypres (West Flanders) in 1581.

Adriaensen’s exploits were still making the rounds as late as 1688, when he appeared as the anti-hero of the ballad “The Lusty Fryar of Flanders”. In this ballad it is mentioned the Fryar got 30 nuns of Gaunt pregnant in a space of 3 weeks and afterwards made his escape.

The story of Adriaensen was mostly drawn to the attention of the public through the book Historia flagellantium (History of flagellation) by Abbé Jacques Boileau, which was published in 1700 and prohibited in 1703. What got him on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books by 1703 was a story about Father Cornelius Adriaensen, a 16th-century priest who, after striking his young female acolytes with knotted cords, went on to tenderly touch their naked buttocks and thighs with his rods of willow and birch. More shockingly, Boileau claimed that Adriaenson’s evident pleasure was not an exception but the rule—that flagellation was, by its nature, erotically ambivalent and deliberately so. His book signals the great divide: From 1700 forward, the whip would be identified less with piety or penance than with sexual arousal.