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Arnauld de Oihenart

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ARNAULD DE OIHENART (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 forty-five MS. volumes, which were sent by his son Gabriel to Colbert. Twentythree of these are in the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris (Coll. Duchesne).

Oihenart published in 1625 a Declaration 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 included in Galland's Memoires pour l'histoire de Navarre (1648). His most important work is Notitia utriusque Vasconiae, turn Ibericae, tum Aquitanicae, qua praeter situm regionis et alia scitu digna, Navarrae regum coeterarumquo: in its insignum vetustate et dignitate familiarum. .. (Paris, 1638 and 1656), a description of Gascony and Navarre. His collection of over five hundred Basque proverbs, Atsotizac edo Refravac, included in a volume of his poems O Ce " 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 bibliographic de la langue basque (Paris, 1891); J. B. E. de Jaurgain, Arnaud d'Oihenart et sa famille (Paris, 1885).