Arnauld de Oihenart
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Arnauld de Oihenart (1592–1668) was a Basque historian and poet.
[edit] Biography
Born at Mauleon, he 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 manuscript volumes, which were sent by his son Gabriel to Colbert. Twenty-three of these are in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris (Coll. Duchesne).
Oihenart 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 included in Galland's Mémoires pour l'histoire de Navarre (1648). His most important work is Notitia utriusque Vasconiae, tum Ibericae, tum Aquitanicae, qua praeter situm regions et alia scitu digna, Navarrae regum coeterarumque: in its insignum vetustate et dignitate familiarum... (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 0e Gastaroa Nevrthizetan, printed in Paris in 1657, was supplemented by a second collection, Atsotizen Vrrhenquina. The proverbs were edited by Francisque Xavier Michel (1847), and the supplement by P. Hariston (1892) and by V. Stempf (1894).
See Julien Vinson, Essai d'une bibliographie de la langue basque (Paris, 1891); J. B. E. de Jaurgain, Arnaud d'Oihenart et sa famille (Paris, 1885).
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
