Record rainfall, page-12

Rainfall and, in limited areas, sea level change can be useful to get a long term look at variations in the past (pre industrial) since the methodology is simple and consistent.

Temperature is much harder since this melds equipment, location variations through time, and before weather stations we are left with proxies.
Ljungqvist 2012 is useful since it attempts to capture numerous proxies and graphs them together so the investigator can see the relative changes and the differences in proxies. Note this study is for the northern hemisphere but there are similar ones for our side of the globe. Note also other more tenuous studies suggest the Roman warm and Minoan warm were even warmer.

When I use these, the first thing i look at it is, what proxy has been used and how does it track with other methods.

So depending on which proxy you use you can conclude many things. However there is a strong case for the Little Ice Age (~1400-1850), with warming for almost all proxies starting about a century before WWII and heavy man-made emissions. Our ~40 slight warming cycle is nothing new under the sun.

https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/8/227/2012/cp-8-227-2012.html