Oihenart, Arnauld De
OIHENART, ARNAULD DE (i 592-1668), Basque historian and poet, was born at Mauleon, and studied law at Bordeaux, where he took his degree in 161 2. He practised first in his native town, and after his marriage with Jeanne d'Erdoy, the heiress of a noble family of Saint-Palais, at the bar of the parlement of Navarre. He spent his leisure and his fortune in the search for documents bearing on the old Basque and Bearnese provinces; and the fruits of his studies in the archives of Bayonne, Toulouse, Pau, Perigord and other cities were embodied in foity-five MS. volumes, which were sent by his son Gabriel to Colbert. Twentythree of these are in the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris (Coll. Duchesne).
Oihcnart published in 1625 a Declaration hislorique de I'injuste usurpation et retention de la Navarre par les Kspagnols and a fragment of a Latin work on the same subject is in< luded in Galland's Me.moires pour I'histoire de Navarre (164H). His most important work is Notitia utriusque Vasconiae, turn Ibcricae, turn A quitanicae , qua praeter situm regionis et alia scilu digna, Navarrae regum coeterarumque: in iis insignum vctustate et dignitate familiurum . . . (Paris, 1638 and 1O56), a description of Gascony and Navarre. His collection of over five hundred Basque proverbs, Atsotizac edo Kefravac, included in a volume of his poems U"" Gastaroa Nevrthizetan, printed in Paris in 1657, was supplemented by a second collection, Atsotizen Vrrhenquina. The proverbs were edited by Francisque Michel (Paris, 1847), and the su|)plcmcnt by P. Hariston (Bayonne, 1892) and by V. Stempf (Bordeaux, 1894). See Julien Vinson, iiat d'une bibliographie de la langue basque (Paris, l8gi); J. B. E. de Jaurgain, Arnaud d'Oihenart et sa famille (Paris, 1885).
Note - this article incorporates content from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, (1910-1911)
