How would a wealthy European individual or family around 1500 keep their home clean? What sorts of "cleaning products" would they (or rather, their servants) use?

PART 1

Interesting question! The first thing to note is that housekeeping and cleaning practices varied widely across different parts of Europe and different social strata in Europe in the early modern age. The cleaning of peasant households was a much simpler matter because custom, sumptuary laws, and plain old economics severely limited the furniture and possessions that a peasant owned (wood needed to be conserved for fires, agricultural activities, and maintenance of lords' forest hunting grounds, and could rarely be spared for such vanities as furniture), so housekeeping for peasants was mainly a matter of sweeping, mopping, and wiping surfaces with hot water and maybe some soap made of animal fat. For royalty, nobility, wealthy farmers, and wealthy merchants, it was another matter. Many travel guides from that era remark that Holland and Italy (particularly the upper classes) had some of the tidiest domestic practices. One of the theories about this is that they are both relatively humid countries, where wood is more likely to mold and rot if it is not scrubbed and polished.[1] However, Switzerland and some parts of Germany were also relatively known for tidiness. The historian Bas van Bavel makes a strong case that cleanliness correlated with the dairy industry. The dairy industry required greatly sanitary conditions, because it was easy for bacteria to get into dairy and ruin the product.[2]

Thomas Brockbank called early modern housekeeping the "many-headed monster."[3] Thus, van Bavel cites numerous early modern travel journals that recounted the almost frantic cleanliness of servants and housewives in dairying areas like Holland, where they would sweep paths often, lay down cloth at thresholds to prevent the tracking in of dirt, make the men wear house slippers when they came inside, scrub and polish surfaces and belongings, wash and scrub clothing and linens, use hot water and soap, and dry their wooden cleaning buckets not in the sun but over a fire because they felt that that got the bucket cleaner than air drying (unbeknownst to them, they were onto something--although bacteria wouldn't be discovered until 1670, drying things with fire was much more effective at killing bacteria and preventing mold). Of course, there was usually great concern about the conservation of fire wood in early modern Europe, so resourceful servants and housewives would rather clean buckets using the fires from burning straw or peapods than making a fire specifically for cleaning (thereby "killing two birds with one stone").[see footnote 2 again] Kitchen utensils also had to be cleaned, and most of these cleaning techniques were passed on orally from generation to generation (and never written down), since servants were by-and-large illiterate in the early modern era.[4]

Van Bavel further points out that of all the dairy products, butter is the most susceptible to ruination by bacteria and impurities, and since Holland particularly specialized in butter production, this made them all the more cleanliness-conscious.[5] Dairy-making and butter-making were not sufficient conditions for cleanliness however. Adam Smith noted in The Wealth of Nations, in the case of Scotland: "If [the market price for dairy products] is very low, indeed, [the Scottish dairy farmer] will be likely to manage his dairy in a very slovenly and dirty manner ... [and] will suffer the business to be carried on amidst the smoke, filth, and nastiness of his own kitchen; as was the case of almost all the farmers dairies in Scotland thirty or forty years ago."[6] Van Bavel argues that making butter and other dairy products for market (requiring products that could last for weeks), rather than for personal consumption (which only had to last for several days), created a special impetus for Dutch dairy farmers to practice extreme cleanliness and hygiene, because Holland was such a commercial society oriented around long distance trade.[7]

Although both men and women were responsible for cleanliness and hygiene at some level, women were--of course--seen as the ones ultimately responsible for cleanliness. Uncleanness was typically seen as due to a lack of women, and this was most pronounced in military settings.[8] Erica Longfellow quotes from Gervase Markham's English Huswife (1615), where Markham says: "the perfit Husbandman, who is the father and master of the family, and whose office and imployments are euer for the most part abroad, or remoued from the house, as in the field or yarde ... [as well as] our english Hous-wife, who is the mother and Mistris of the family, and hath her most generall imployments within the house.”[9] "Economy" was a synonym for female housework in the early modern era, which Sara Pennell argues revealed the place of "female expertise ... as an essential underpinning of economic survival and success."[10] This concept is still noticeable today where schools still have classes called "home economics."