I play early music as an amateur, and I've seen a few fun older instruments around.
I'm currently learning the renaissance lute, a bowl-backed six to 8 course precursor (sort of) to the modern guitar. It has a large period repertoire that can be played pretty accurately due to the surviving tablature and plentiful treatises on technique and style. It is a plucked instrument, they really weren't strummed much like a modern guitar.
The older variant, the medieval lute, was primarily a strummed instrument; the musician would usually hold a quill or similar tool as a plectrum. The notation at the time was not as complete as what we are used to (and there are also far fewer sources on how to read it), but there is some very good scholarship in the field that gives us a pretty decent guess on how the repertoire sounded.
The recorder went through a kind of revival in the early 20th century, as it was a fairly easy folk instrument to mass produce while also being beginner friendly (since you don't really need to develop your embrasure to make a passable sound). The modern variety is known as the baroque recorder, and has a standardized fingering with a more mellow sound than it's earlier counterparts. Incidentally, flutes are likely some of the oldest instruments that humanity produced, with the oldest known example being a cave bear bone flute probably made by a Neanderthal.