A few notes on Anne Pennington's life and work contributed by prof. Dimitri Conomos

Anne Pennington (1934–1981) died on 27 May 1981, after an illness of which she was given forewarning many years before, and which she accepted with simplicity, directness and great courage. Three days before her death she was still driving her car and planning to leave Oxford for a conference in Bulgaria. Only on the last day of her life did she altogether cease working.

Her early academic interest concerned the philological tradition and historical tradition of 17^th century Russia and her major work was an edition, with a detailed linguistic commentary, of Grigory Kotoshikin’s memoir Russia in the Reign of Aleksey Mikhailovich (Oxford, 1980). This treatise is a mine of information on the society and institutions of 17^th century Russia and Anne’s book of nearly 800 pages was welcomed as a major contribution to the history of the Russian language.

In the 1970s her interest shifted to Romania, particularly to the centre of church music which flourished during the 16^th century in the Moldavian Monastery of Putna. She was able to prove that several Church Slavonic manuscripts with musical notation dating from this period – now in Putna, Dragomirna, Mytilene, Bucureşti, Saint Petersburg, Iaşi, Sofia, and Leipzig, came from this monastery’s scriptorium. This discovery proved that the musical tradition of Putna was neither simply local nor wholly limited to a brief period. Its international character could be demonstrated by the abundance of bi-lingual chants of Romanian, Serbian and Greek origin. The Romanian compositions of the famous protopsaltes, Evstatie, and his school clearly showed tendencies that were both conservative and innovative.

One of her companions on these travels remembers her alertness to sounds. She seemed to be always listening: listening to village chat, to the intonations of a local dialect, a vowel inflection of peasant speech, or some unfamiliar musical rhythm. Her interest in popular music, costume and dance drew her to the Balkan lands, with its great natural beauty. There, by the shores of a lake, or at poetry festivals, she was perhaps at her happiest and most relaxed. In Oxford she was the joint founder of a Balkan dance group that met weekly and she attended regularly for some 20 years.

Her study of the language, music, dance, cuisine, art, and architecture of the Balkans inevitably brought her into contact with the Orthodox Church. She assimilated and appreciated many aspects of Orthodoxy, which helped to deepen her inner life of prayer. She sang regularly in the choir of Oxford’s Orthodox Church.

Anne was not only a first-class scholar: she was also an outstanding human being. Her academic achievements were those of a modest, warm and sensitive person, possessed of a rare gift for bringing people together, and for encouraging in her friends the development of their talents. Her energy was remarkable, and she packed more into her short life than most people do in one of normal length.