Caroline Bammel

Caroline Penrose Bammel, (née Hammond; 6 July 1940 – 31 October 1995), also known as Caroline Hammond Bammel, was a Cornish She first met her father, N. G. L. Hammond, at the age of five as he had been away fighting in the Second World War.

She was educated at Clifton High School, then an all-girls private school in Clifton, Bristol.

Bammel remained at Girton College to research "the continuity and discontinuity between the 'classical' Greek and Latin world and the new attitudes brought into being as people in the Roman Empire became Christian",

Academic career For the 1965/1966 academic year, Bammel was an Alexander von Humboldt research fellow at LMU Munich. There, she was able to attend the graduate seminar run by Bernhard Bischoff on hagiography.

Bammel then returned to Girton College, Cambridge, and held a research fellowship for the next two years. In 1968, she was elected a Fellow of Girton College, and made a college lecturer in classics. She was additionally appointed Director of Studies in theology in 1976. In 1975, she also joined the staff of the Faculty of Divinity; she was an assistant lecturer from 1975 to 1980, a lecturer from 1980 to 1992, and Reader in Early Church History from 1992.

Bammel's research concerned the history of early Christianity. She took a particular interest in Origen, the Greek early Christian theologian, and other early Christian writers.

In 1994, Bammel was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

Personal life In 1979, the then Caroline Hammond married Ernst Bammel, a fellow lecturer in the Faculty of Divinity. She had learnt German while an undergraduate and became fluent during her year researching in Germany. As her husband was German, they mainly spoke German at home. They did not have any children.

Death In her late forties, Bammel was diagnosed with terminal cancer. On 31 October 1995, after a number of years living with the disease, she died in Cambridge, England; she was aged 55. She is buried in the Bammel family grave in Kessenich, Bonn, Germany.

Selected works