Arnauld de Oihenart (7 August 1592 – 14 January 1668) was a Basque lawyer, politician, historian and poet.
He practised first in his native town, and after his marriage to Jeanne d'Erdoy, the heiress of a noble family of Saint-Palais, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, at the bar of the Parliament of Navarre.
[citation needed] He spent his leisure and his fortune in the search for documents bearing on the old Basque and Béarnese provinces; and the fruits of his studies in the archives of Bayonne, Toulouse, Pau, Périgord and other cities were embodied in forty-five manuscript volumes, which were sent by his son Gabriel to Colbert.
His collection of 537 Basque proverbs or adages, Atsotizac edo Refravac, included in a volume of his poems Gastroa Nevrthizetan, printed in Paris in 1657 under the French title Les Proverbes Basques Recueillis Par Le Sr D’Oihenart, Plus Les Poesies Basques du mesme Auteur, was supplemented by a second collection, Atizen Venquina.
[1] See Julien Vinson, Essai d'une bibliographie de la langue basque (Paris, 1891); J.