1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Oihenart, Arnauld de
OIHENART, ARNAULD DE (1592–1668), Basque historian and poet, was born at Mauleon, and studied law at Bordeaux, where he took his degree in 1612. 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. Twenty-three of these are in the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris (Coll. Duchesne).
Oihcnart published in 1625 a Déclaration historique de l'injuste usurpation et retention de la Navarre par les Espagnols and a fragment of a Latin work on the same subject is in< luded in Galland's Me.moires pour I'histoire de Navarre (1648). His most important work is Notitia utriusque Vasconiae, turn Ibericae, tum A quitanicae, qua praeter situm regionis et alia scilu digna, Navarrae regum coeterarumque: in iis insignum vetustate et dignitate familiarum . . . (Paris, 1638 and 1056), a description of Gascony and Navarre. His collection of over five hundred Basque proverbs, Atsotizac edo Kefravac, included in a volume of his poems Oten 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 supplement by P. Hariston (Bayonne, 1892) and by V. Stempf (Bordeaux, 1894). See Julien Vinson, Essai d'une bibliographies de la langue basque (Paris, 1891); J. B. E. de Jaurgain, Arnaud d'Oihenart et sa famille (Paris, 1885).