Marian devotion has represented until today crucial aspect of Christian, especially Catholic, spirituality. Its extraordinary flourishing took plače in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Pietas Mariana became an imprescindible component of Baroque religiousness. The vigour of Baroque Marian devotion brought about not only the veneration of statues and pictures, but also the reintroduction of pilgrimages and the building of Marian pilgrimage sites throughout the land. One of the most influential Catholic orders that contributed in an important degree to development and spreading of Marian devotion was the Society of Jesus. Aside of their educational and pastora! activities, the Jesuits served as custodians of important Marian pilgrimage sites, as was also the case of the residence in Golčův Jeníkov, where they remained in the years 1657-1773. Throughout this time, they constructed Marian pilgrimage site of regional importance where religious brotherhood had been established and where Loretan devotion had been spread. The everyday life of the residence brought about many activities, among them the organization of festivals along the lines of Baroque ostentatiousness and regular radius of pilgrimages.
The qualitative research is focused on the population of women who had their first child after thirty (in the case of no influence of medical problems that should lead to their prior childlessness) and observes, with the aid of grounded theory, if the women consider their motherhood delayed and how they define the reasons, which caused their having a child at that age. The following paper summarizes some substantial findings from an actual research. As the research has shown, motherhood after thirty is defined by women as both delayed (they became a mother later, than they had primarily intended) and non-delayed (they had a child when they wanted it). The essential criterion for planning and timing of having a child in both cases is the negotiating among partners and (dis)agreement over motivations and expectations of men and women. In general, there is an evident influence of cultural and value changes on timing of motherhood in the Czech Republic, which implicates the change in traditional life cycle and emergence of the new life stage (c. among 20-30 years of life) when young adults remain childless.