The English word "resistance" is obviously etymologically related to resistentia, and I would like to understand how good of a translation resistentia. To be clear, I mean resistance in the sense of a rebellious movement, strong opposition to present rule, or something similar. There are several words in L&S which translate to "resistance" or "opposition":
Based on the dictionary entries, I don't see much of a difference between these. Are there differences, or are they pretty much interchangeable? Does the extant text corpus suggest notable differences in tone or style?
Judging by intuition — which is known to have failed miserably — I see a distinction into three categories: The ones coming from pugna refer to armed resistance. The ones coming from refragari I don't understand; I don't see where they come from so that I could see what kind of a nuance they might have. Finally resistentia sounds like standing against something, suggesting a different tone from the more militant words. I have no proof to substantiate my guesswork, and I might be reading too much into things. However, I do think that the pugna-words mean essentially the same thing, and so do the refragari-words; the question is then whether these three classes differ from each other.
L&S mentions that resistentia is a late Latin word for repugnantia, so those seem to be synonyms. Otherwise I find the entries hard to compare.