Word Finder - pretensions

definition

A claim or aspiration to a particular status or quality.

definition

Pretentiousness.

The Portuguese also advance claims to be the first discoverers of Australia, but so far the evidence cannot be said to establish their pretensions.

In the reign of Michael's successor, Alexius (1645-76), the country recovered its strength so rapidly that the tsar was tempted to revive the energetic aggressive policy and put forward claims to Livonia, Lithuania and Little Russia, but he was obliged to moderate his pretensions.

Holding that chemistry had not attained the rank of a science - his lectures dealt with the "effects of heat and mixture" - he had an almost morbid horror of hasty generalization or of anything that had the pretensions of a fully fledged system.

There were several violent contests between rivals anxious to secure so splendid a position as the electorate, and the pretensions of the archbishops occasionally moved the citizens of Mainz to revolt.

After six years the differences between the old and the young philosopher grew too marked for friendship. Comte began to fret under Saint-Simon's pretensions to be his director.

Mill was chilled by these pretensions; and the correspondence came to an end.

They were gratuitous and popular, and in them he boldly advanced the whole of his doctrine, as well as the direct and immediate pretensions of himself and his system.

However, his pretensions to the French crown gradually became more important.

Hoping to re-establish his position and crush Caracciolo, Sforza favoured the pretensions of Louis III.

In 1290 Charles married Margaret, daughter of Charles II., king of Naples, and renounced his pretensions to Aragon.

It began in the 13th century, as a protest against the theocratic pretensions of the medieval popes.

Speaking generally, the New Town wzs resorted to by professional men - lawyers, doctors and artists, - and in its principal streets will be found the head offices of the leading banks and insurance offices, all lodged in buildings of remarkable architectural pretensions.

The same may be said of his translation of the Odyssey, which was still used as a school-book in the days of Horace, and the religious hymn which he was called upon to compose in 207 had no high literary pretensions.

Ambrosius Macrobius Theodosius (c. 400) wrote a treatise on Cicero's Somnium Scipionis and seven books of miscellanies (Saturnalia); and Martianus Capella (c. 430), a native of Africa, published a compendium of the seven liberal arts, written in a mixture of prose and verse, with some literary pretensions.

Conde's pretensions to scholarship have been severely criticized by Dozy, and his history is now discredited.

The romance of Fierabras (13th century) was one of the most popular in the 15th century, and by later additions came to have pretensions to be a complete history of Charlemagne.

In 1817, by the treaty of Poona, the British government acquired from the peshwa all his rights, interests and pretensions, feudal, territorial or pecuniary, in Bundelkhand.

Two-thirds of the grandduchy consisted of old Russian lands inhabited by men who spoke the Ruthenian language and professed the Orthodox Greek religion, while in the north were the Lithuanians proper, semisavage and semi-catholic, justly proud of their heroic forefathers of the house of Gedymin, and very sensitive of the pretensions of Poland to the provinces of Volhynia and Podolia, the fruits of Lithuanian valour.

They finally exploded the pretensions of the Textus Receptus to be the original text; but neither of them gave any explanation of the relations of the later text to the earlier, nor developed Griesbach's system of dealing with groups of MSS.

Before her relatives could be brought to countenance his pretensions, Kepler was obliged to undertake a journey to Wurttemberg to obtain documentary evidence of the somewhat obscure nobility of his family, and it was thus not until the 27th of April 1597 that the marriage was celebrated.

Although he strictly limited his prophetic pretensions to the estimate of tendencies and probabilities, his forecasts were none the less in demand.

In spite, however, of Gibbon's characteristic scepticism on this point, it is certain that the Constitutum was regarded as genuine both by the friends and the enemies of the papal pretensions throughout the middle ages.

From this time forward it was increasingly used by popes and canonists in support of the papal pretensions, and from the 12th century onwards became a powerful weapon of the spiritual against the temporal powers.

In 983, shortly before his death, she was appointed his viceroy in Italy; and was successful, in concert with the empress Theophano, widow of Otto II., and Archbishop Willigis of Mainz, in defending the right of her infant grandson, Otto III., to the German crown against the pretensions of Henry the Quarrelsome, duke of Bavaria.

Having introduced the principle of primogeniture into Calenberg in 1682, Ernest determined to secure for himself the position of an elector, and the condition of Europe and the exigencies of the emperor favoured his pretensions.

His defence of church property and privilege against the predatory instincts of the nobles and the pretensions of the state brought him into conflict with Lethington and others; but he seems to have condoned, if he was not privy to, Riccio's murder.

Barton turned out afterwards to have been an impostor, but she had duped More, who now lived in a superstitious atmosphere of convents and churches, and he had given his countenance to her supernatural pretensions.

It had no pretensions to verbal accuracy, and the coarseness of the language was modified to suit European taste, but the narrative was adequately rendered.

In Eastern Christendom the papacy was at this period an almost forgotten institution, whose pretensions were always Schism of met by the combined opposition of the imperial East and authority, which was still preponderant in the West.

As to Gregory's political pretensions, zealous theorists were quick to transform them into legal principles; and though his immediate successors, somewhat deafened by the disturbance which they had aroused, seem to have neglected them at first, they were handed on to more distant heirs and reappeared in future struggles.

In the secular contest, Germany and the imperialist pretensions of its leaders were invariably the principal obstacle.

In this case, too, the Sicilian Vespers was the rock on which the hopes and pretensions of the sovereign of Naples suffered shipwreck.

The continued efforts of the popes to drain Christian gold to Rome were limited only by the fiscal pretensions of the lay sovereigns, and it was this financial rivalry that gave rise to the inevitable conflict between Boniface VIII.

Schmidt published his Grammatik der tibetischen Sprache in 1839 and his Tibetisch-deutsches Worterbuch in 1841, but neither of these works justified the great pretensions of the author, whose access to Mongolian sources had enabled him to enrich the results of his labours with a certain amount of information unknown to his predecessors.

Defeated both by land and sea, the French prince renounced his pretensions and evacuated England, leaving the regency to deal with the more difficult questions raised by the lawless insolence of the royal partisans.

Charles allied himself with his brother Louis the German to resist the pretensions of the emperorLothair, and the two alliesconqueredhim in the bloody victory of Fontenoyen-Puisaye (25 June 84,).

He had been accused in 1562 of a plot to seize the queen and put her into the keeping of the earl of Arran, whose pretensions to her hand ended only when his insanity could no longer be concealed.

But his pretensions were ludicrous; he was quickly captured by the Chileans and sent back to France (1862) as a madman; and though he made one more abortive effort in 1874 to recover his "kingdom," and occupied his pen in magnifying his achievements, nobody took him seriously except a few of the deluded Indians.

The Dutch, however, being masters of the sea, kept the coast closely blockaded, and through sheer exhaustion the king of Spain and the archdukes were compelled to agree to a truce for twelve years (9th of April 1609) with the United Provinces " in the capacity of free states over which Albert and Isabel made no pretensions."

With characteristic caution Louis Philippe refused to commit himself by any overt pretensions, and announced his intention of going to America; but in the hope that something might happen in France to his advantage, he postponed his departure, travelling instead through the Scandinavian countries as far north as Lapland.

In 1361, however, he abandoned his pretensions, but claimed the title of archduke and in 1364 declared that the possessions of the Habsburgs were indivisible.

In religious matters the empress, though a devout Catholic and herself devoted to the Holy See, was carried away by the prevailing reaction, in which her ministers shared, against the pretensions of the papacy.

Such a body, Metternich held, " powerful for defence, powerless for offence," would form a guarantee of the peace of central Europe - and of the preponderance of Austria; and in its councils Austrian diplomacy, backed by the weight of the Habsburg power beyond the borders of Germany, would exercise a greater influence than any possible prestige derived from a venerable title that had become a by-word for the union of unlimited pretensions with practical impotence.

The Nationalists were, too, divided into many warring sectionsMahommed Bey Fend, chosen as successor to Mustafa Kamel, had to contend with the pretensions of several other leaders.

The hostility of Poland and the break up of Russia involved him in two overseas contests for the possession of Livonia and Ingria, while his pretensions to Lapland brought upon him a war with Denmark in the last year of his reign.

Though alarmed by the revolutionary agitation in Germany, which culminated in the murder of his agent, the dramatist Kotzebue, Alexander approved of Castlereagh's protest against Metternich's policy of " the governments contracting an alliance against the peoples," as formulated in the Carlsbad decrees, 1819, and deprecated any intervention of Europe to support " a league of which the sole object is the absurd pretensions of absolute power."

These pretensions were incompatible with the freedom of the state andof individuals.

The king had to do with preachers who practically held the doctrines of Becket as to priestly pretensions.

The strange thing is that while Elizabeth warned James against the pretensions of men who " would have no king but a presbytery," whenever he was at odds with the ministers and with the nobles who kept trying to seize his person with the approval of the ministers, Elizabeth secretly or openly backed the kirk.

By " Presbyterianism " we are here to understand, not the Presbyterian form of church government - the kirk whose motto is Nec tamen consumebatur - but the pretensions of preachers to dominate the state by the mythical " power of the keys," by excommunication with civil penalties and by the fiercest religious intolerance.