Yet there was one species of abuse of the confessional, not contemplated in the papal briefs, which the Spanish Inquisition, by a somewhat forced construction, classed with solicitation. This, which was known as flagellation, consisted in imposing penance of the discipline and administering it on the spot, or letting the penitent administer it herself, in either case requiring her to disrobe and expose herself to a greater or less degree. Sometimes this was mingled with the debased mystic ardor, of which we have seen examples above, leading both parties to expose themselves and lash one another. The earliest case that I have met of this occurred in 1606, at Nájera, when María Escudero, a widow aged 40, testified that she had long confessed to the Franciscan Fray Diego de Burgos. They exchanged vows of obedience to each other; he would visit her in her house when they would discipline each other with exposure almost complete, under agreement that their eyes should be kept closed. Then he introduced a pious exercise still more indecent, but he was always scrupulously correct in the confessional. She chanced to make a general confession to another priest who refused absolution unless she would denounce Fray Diego. The case was evidently novel and dragged on until 1609, when it reached the Suprema, which submitted the matter to two calificadores. One opined that the acts savored of the heresy of the Adamites and Alumbrados; the other attributed it merely to imprudent simplicity and ignorance. Apparently there was no precedent for guidance and the case seems to have been suspended.[237] A parallel case, with a different ending, was one in which there were a number of women concerned and the practices were foul almost beyond belief. The priest was an ignorant and simple man who, by the advice of another confessor, came with the women to denounce themselves. He was sentenced to rigid reclusion in a convent, where he died after giving a most edifying example, and the women were not prosecuted, as they were mostly barefooted Carmelites and Capuchins.[238] The _flagelante_ soon came to be recognized as an offender akin to the solicitor, and was held to be subject to the papal briefs. The old inquisitor, who relates the last case, and writers like de Sousa and Alberghini, all speak of stripping penitents and disciplining them as a species of solicitation, to be visited with the same penalties.[239] As a rule, in fact, it was regarded as rendering the offence more serious, for it inferred more than the technical suspicion of heresy, especially after Molinism had deepened the guilt of Illuminism, and we find allusions to _hereges flagelantes_. Cases become frequent in the records and we even, in 1730, find a Fray Domingo Calvo spontaneously denouncing himself to the Madrid tribunal for having caused himself to be flagellated, showing to what means perverted sexual instincts resorted for gratification.[240]