Godfrey wettinger biography

Godfrey Wettinger was a laborious student of history who grew up to challenge the myths and dogma propagated by the clerical establishment for hundreds of years. He slashed so hard and wrote so much, that there were no more myths left to debunk. Godfrey Wettinger, born in , was raised in Mellieha by his mother after his father, a school headmaster, died when the young Godfrey still had not reached his teenage years.

Biography. Wettinger was.

While Godfrey was studying history under the supervision of highly trained professionals, Malta lacked professional and qualified historians. When the then-Royal University of Malta opened the first Department of History in , and the University was still lacking a decent library, its first head of the history department was Dominican friar Andrew Vella, who was by no means professionally trained, let alone a history or relevant social science graduate.

Back then, history and social sciences at the Royal University of Malta were not actually considered proper academic and scientific social sciences, but were treated rather as an extension to the teachings and dogma of the Catholic Church. Wettinger was an essential figure in revolutionising the dogmatic terrain of the history department, and that is the very reason why the established authorities made it so hard for him to join the University of Malta as a full-time lecturer.

On September 3, , Wettinger created his first controversy with a letter to the Times of Malta. He picked up classical Arabic and Latin all by himself, refined his skills in paleography and read any book he deemed relevant to his studies. In the meantime, he studied for his PhD with a thesis on the history of slavery in Malta, and spent time researching and looking for Medieval documents at the Cathedral and the Notarial archives.

This discovery ensured the respect and recognition of the public for Wettinger, despite his historical views being generally accepted to be in direct contradiction to those of the clerical establishment. In , Wettinger applied for the second time to become a lecturer at the University of Malta. He was still short of his PhD which he obtained two years later in but, confident of his academic abilities, refused to let this deter him.

During the interview, an irate Ugo Mifsud Bonnici asked him what he knew about Marxism. As it happened, just a few months after the selection process was completed, the newly appointed Borg Olivier passed away and the University had no choice but to admit Wettinger into the post.