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Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel!
You asked for our opinion of the name "Alejandra de Navarra" as a choice
for a persona in Navarre in the 15th or 16th century.
Both Talan and Arval are members of the Academy, and we feel that they have
already given you all the information that we have available. We are
confident that "Alejandra de Navarra" is a correct name for your period,
though as you know, the evidence for "Alejandra" is not particularly
strong. We will summarize it in the rest of this letter.
We haven't found any examples of "Alejandra" or "Alejandro" in the lists of
period Spanish names we have. However, we did find an example of the
surname "Alexandre" in 1128 [1], which suggests that the given name
"Alexander" was in use around 1100. At that point (Old Spanish), the Latin
X (= /ks/) was still written <x> but pronounced /S/ (= \sh\). It wasn't
until the period 1600-1650 that the sound /S/ shifted to /x/ (= \kh\)
(ibid., 88). It's likely that the <x> spelling persisted at least that
long, since Penny notes that the modern spellings of words that now have
<j> (= /x/ = \kh\) date from the 18th & 19th c. spelling reforms [2].
Most Spanish male names had female counterparts, so we can say that
"Alexandra" is a plausible Spanish woman's name. "Alexandra" is a fairly
common name in English, German, Russian, and French, and forms of the name
are found in Italian (Alessandra), and possibly in Irish and Scots. Its
popularity grew in large part out of the popularity of the romances of
Alexander the Great, which were widely read throughout Western Europe from
the 12th century through the Renaissance. However, since we didn't find
any examples of "Alejandro" and only one example of a surname based on
"Alejandro," there is reason to conclude that "Alejandro" (and, by
extension, "Alejandra") was not common.
Arval
References
[1] R. P. Gonzalo Diez Melcon, Apellidos Castellano-Leoneses (Universidad
de Granada, 1957), 54.
[2] Ralph Penny, A History of the Spanish Language (Cambridge, 1995, p. 61)