seems to find Bertilak as attractive as the narrator finds the Green Knight. Bertilak, however, follows the homosocial code and develops a friendship with Gawain. Gawain's embracing and kissing Bertilak in several scenes thus represents not a homosexual but a homosocial expression. Men of the time often embraced and kissed, and this was acceptable under the chivalric code. Nonetheless, Zeikowitz claims the Green Knight blurs the lines between homosociality and homosexuality, representing the difficulty medieval writers sometimes had in separating the two. Queer scholar Carolyn Dinshaw argues that the poem may have been a response to accusations that Richard II had a male lover—an attempt to re-establish the idea that heterosexuality was the Christian norm. Around the time the poem was written, the Catholic Church was beginning to express concerns about kissing between males. Many religious figures were trying to make the distinction between strong trust and friendship between males and homosexuality. She asserts that the Pearl Poet seems to have been simultaneously entranced and repulsed by homosexual desire. According to Dinshaw, in his other poem Cleanness, he points out several grievous sins, but spends lengthy passages describing them in minute detail, and she sees this alleged' obsession' as carrying over to Gawain in his descriptions of the Green Knight. Beyond this, Dinshaw proposes that Gawain can be read as a woman-like figure. In her view, he is the passive one in the advances of Bertilak's wife, as well as in his encounters with Bertilak himself, where he acts the part of a woman in kissing the man. However, while the poem does have homosexual elements, these elements are brought up by the poet to establish heterosexuality as the normal lifestyle of Gawain's world. The poem does this by making the kisses between the Lady and Gawain sexual in nature but rendering the kisses between Gawain and Bertilak "unintelligible" to the medieval reader. In other words, the poet portrays kisses between a man and a woman as having the possibility of leading to sex, while in a heterosexual world, kisses between a man and a man are portrayed as having no such possibility. Modern adaptations Books Though the surviving manuscript dates from the fourteenth century, the first published version of the poem did not appear until as late as 1839, when Sir Frederic Madden of the British Museum recognised the poem as worth reading. Madden's scholarly, Middle English edition of