This spring I will be teaching a course on European social history from 1300-1800. I am looking to assign two monographs in addition to primary source texts. I have most of these lined up, but I am inquiring as to whether anyone here has ideas for easily digestible monographs about European social history north of the Alps, preferably after 1500, but it doesn't need to be. I am well acquainted with late medieval social history, and have an idea about some possibilities for the early modern component of the course, but I thought I'd through this out the the readers of this subreddit.
I want the book to have a fun premise. Something along the lines of Montaillou, but more current and not fundamentally flawed in its methodology. I am interested topics such as witchcraft, material culture, gender, religious conversion whatever.
Not exactly what you're after, but I'd recommend an essay collection I stumbled into while browsing the stacks during my undergrad, Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Religion and Sexuality in Early Modern Europe, (New York and London, 1994). A thought provoking and evocative selection of case studies. Cf. Carlo Ginzburg in relation to this.
This one covers a lot of ground that you are looking for: witchcraft and persecution in context of early modern economy, politics, social relations, gender and cultural studies...in Northern Europe. And it's engagingly written by a good historian, the book is now a landmark reference. It offers a lot of stories which can be used as material by students.
The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German Village by Thomas Robisheaux is a readable and recent microhistory of one of the last witch trials in Germany in 1672.
The German Discovery of the World: Renaissance Encounters with the Strange and Marvelous by Christine R. Johnson is an enjoyable book on Renaissance Germany that departs from the typical mode of German Renaissance historiography (all roads lead to Luther). Johnson examine how Germans assimilated or rejected products from the New World.
Since you asked for a fun premise, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World by Marcy Norton tackles how Spanish society adapted both chocolate and tobacco, which was not as straightforward as I expected when I read it.
Is there anything by Bynum you could assign? She's good with medieval gender and religious history. For extra fun, you could assign the argument between her and Leo Steinberg over Steinberg's The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion.